Don’t know why, but debian squeeze is not yet officially supported on my VPS vendor of choice – slicehost.com. This blog post got me started down a very easy path – upgrading a lenny slice to squeeze.

1. Get a lenny slice. Log in.
2. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to start clean.
3. apt-get install locales followed by dpkg-reconfigure locales to fix that annoying perl locale warning (optional, but SRSLY – why not?)
4. Make sure your slice is using the latest slicehost kernel in the control panel.
5. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list, replacing “lenny” with “squeeze”. The debian-volatile repo has been deprecated, so replace all references to it with “deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian squeeze-updates main contrib non-free“
6. apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
7. Watch lines scroll by, answer whatever questions you get asked.
8. Reboot.
9. ???
10. Profit.

I think it took me longer to type those instructions than it did to complete the entire process.

On a side note – I’m done with ubuntu LTS on my servers. The crap they did meddling with sysvinit and a bunch of other minor annoyances have convinced me I should get back on debian stable. I’ll probably still use kubuntu for my desktops / laptops (and we’ll probably still stick with ubuntu at Berkman), but it’s debian stable where it’s my choice from now on.