Today I took the plunge and installed lenny on my home computer. Its a desktop computer / experimental server. The process was remarkably simple. I edited /etc/apt/sources.list, and replaced all instances of etch with lenny. Then I ran apt-get -yd dist-upgrade to download the packages first. At first I didn’t have enough room to download all 560MB worth of new packages, fortunately when I set it up this system I used LVM. I was able to add another couple gig’s to the partition, and the lvextend and resizext2fs commands worked perfectly to grow my root volume without unmounting it or rebooting.

Once that was done, it took about 4 hours to download all the packages, but once that was done, the rest was pretty painless. The only hitch was that I was using the fglrx driver (the non-free driver for ATI Radeon cards) for X, which didn’t work after the upgrade. For now, I’ve just gone back to using the normal radeon driver.

Lenny comes with Firefox 3 (aka iceweasel), and Thunderbird 2.0, so I’ve got an up to date browser and mail client. The new gnome icons look more polished and professional. So far, I like what I see.