On Sat, 1 Sep 2018 10:49:17 +0200
KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 10:58:58AM +0100, Mark Hindley wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have an old and venerable headless system that runs Debian
> > Wheezy. Now Wheezy is EOL I need to upgrade without pulling in
> > systemd and dbus. Devuan is the obvious choice.
> >
> > I can't find any specific instructions or report of Wheezy -> ASCII
> > migration. Does anybody have experience of it?
> >
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> you shouldn't "skip" a relase :) It's safer to get to Devuan Jessie
> first, and then upgrade to ASCII from there. So following the
> instruction reported below:
>
> https://devuan.org/os/documentation/dev1fanboy/
>
> to upgrade to Jessie and then to upgrade to ASCII should get you up to
> speed.
>
> HND
>
> KatolaZ
>

Being an elder in the Church of the Known State, I'd personally
recommend a fresh, clean ASCII install. Treat it as a spring cleaning
to get rid of ghosts of operating systems past. Install fresh, copy
your data, and you're 90% done. There will be a few special configs
you'll need to edit in the new system, based on the old.

Usual suggestions apply: Perform your package manager's command for
listing packages installed by a human (and not simply because they're
dependencies of somebody else). Record the output of mount, lsblk, ip
addr, ip route, and of course, completely back up the whole old machine.

For extra speed, add a 256GB SSD for /, and have directories whose data
changes (like /home as one example) mounted from a spinning disk. I've
had great success with such a setup: Commands run from /usr/bin come
right off the SSD with surprisingly little latency.

I mean yeah, you could upgrade, and then upgrade again, and it might
work, but if you do that, will you even really understand what you have?

SteveT

Steve Litt
September 2018 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz