Upgrade Debian Wheezy to Debian Testing

With the recent release of Debian as a stable version, Debian 8 has been announced. The codename for Debian 8 is “Jessie” and it was scheduled to be released during 2015. The Debian Jessie repositories still contain packages available for Debian Wheezy, and the Security-updates repository for Jessie is not yet maintained by the official Debian team.

After this brief introduction to Jessie, I will explain how to upgrade Debian Wheezy to Debian Jessie.

The first step is to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file as root and replace it with the following entries:

deb ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie-proposed-updates main contrib non-free

However, it is important to ensure there are no entries referring to previous versions. After this step, update the repository list by running the following command:

sudo apt-get update

Finally, upgrade the system. Since this is an upgrade to a newer version, run the following command:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade