Updating Crunchbang to the Next Release

I’ve jumped across many Linux distros, and lately I’ve found myself really enjoying the simplicity of Crunchbang. It’s extremely lightweight, and I found my old Asus EEEpc netbook can handle it rather well. Well enough for me to abandon Lubuntu to run it exclusively on that netbook. The only drawback I’ve found is that since it draws directly from Debian stable, I can’t always get the most up to date software. I don’t mind not being bleeding edge, if that was the case I’d be running Arch or Gentoo, but sometimes I would like have some more recent packages available. With that being said, I recently updated my #! configuration to draw from the next release of Debian (jessie) instead of stable (wheezy). Here’s how to do it.

1. Update your sources.list.

   $ sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

   And change all references of stable (wheezy) to testing (jessie). I also updated my references to waldorf to janice to catch new packages for #!.

   ## CRUNCHBANG
   ## Compatible with Debian Wheezy, but use at your own risk.
   deb http://packages.crunchbang.org/janice janice main
   #deb-src http://packages.crunchbang.org/janice janice main
   
   # DEBIAN
   deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie main contrib non-free
   #deb-src http://http.debian.net/debian jessie main contrib non-free
   
   # DEBIAN SECURITY
   deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main
   #deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main

2. Update apt configuration.

   $ sudo vim /etc/apt/preferences

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=janice
   Pin-Priority: 1001
   
   Package: *
   Pin: release a=jessie
   Pin-Priority: 500

3. Upgrade to janice/jessie

   $ sudo apt-get update
   $ sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends dist-upgrade

Overall it was a pretty easy and straightforward process.