This weekend I decided to go for an full Debian dist-upgrade / full-upgrade on my main linux Debian machine. I had a growing list of 'The following packages have been kept back:' and so I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the whole lot.

It is always a bit nervous thing to do, as in the past, I found the upgrade to linux kernel 4.19 stopped the computer from sleeping, so after a full backup, I went for it.

I started with the full upgrade

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

This updated the system, but I wanted to also fix a few errors that I had. eg. My copy of Zeal, which is an offline code reader was showing blank pages. So I added the unstable debian repo to provide newer software versions.

# Unstable repo main, contrib and non-free branches, no security updates here
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib

In doing so, I ended up with errors which complained about version conflicts for a number of packages. These where android packages that I had installed and I forced there removal using these commands as they blocked the upgrade process.

dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq adb
dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq android-libadb
dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq android-libbase
dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq android-libcutils
dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq android-libbase

So this gave me a much more up-to-date system with the version 6 kernel.

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