Upgrading from another Debian

[Bob Nielsen]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 12:48:31PM -0800, Michael R. Bernstein wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:28:51 -0800, Michael R. Bernstein wrote:
> 
> > I've been using Warty on several machines for about three months now, and
> > have been really happy with it.
> > 
> > I have a box with Libranet 2.8.1 installed on it, and I would like to
> > upgrade it to Warty (and later Hoary, but I assume this will be simpler).
> > What procedure should I use?
> 
> No responses so far, so perhaps I should broaden the question:
> 
> What is the best way to upgrade a machine to Ubuntu from another
> Debian-based distribution?

I've tried several and what works best for me is to put /home and 
/usr/local on separate partitions, then install the new distribution 
(ubuntu for the purposes of this list) on a blank partition.  In the 
installation process, I had the ability to define the location of /home, 
but not /usr/local, so I defined the partition where user/local lives as 
/temp.  After the installation was complete, I edited /etc/fstab to 
change /temp to /usr/local.

I suspect that just editing /etc/apt/sources.list and doing a 
dist-upgrade could lead to problems, although it might work in some 
instances.