I'm practicing upgrades on my spare laptop, getting ready for doing my server
upgrade from ascii to beowulf..

They are both running ascii.

Starting, of course, by making the ascii up to date still as ascii, before I try tye
upgrade to beowulf.

Having trouble doing even this innocuous act.

I tried starting by using interactive aptitude to just update and upgrade.

Only to discover that *every* package that might be upgraded was "held", and could
therefore not be upgraded even though newer packages were available.

What could be causing this? Or rather, how should I go about trying to track down
the origin of these holds/this mass hold?

55 packagesin the list of packages held back.
and
282 packages being "automatically held in their current state".

Some of them will not be updated to avoid breaking "the following dependencies" but
there are no dependencied in the list.

Some of them appeared to be held because of suggested packages.

But /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05disable-suggests says

APT::Install-Suggests '0';

(hand-transcribed from the screen, so there might be typos.)
If I understand this, it should be telling it to ignore any suggest-level
dependencies, and it seems not to be doig that.

.

Of course, that might not be the root cause, which I suspect lies elsewhere,
because of the apparent uiversality of the nonupgrades.

-- hendrik