upgrade Ubuntu or Debian

Edit /etc/apt/source.list with the new distribution release. In this example, I upgrade from MIPS lenny to squeeze. By the time you read this squeeze will probably be in archive.debian.org. I wish archive would also include the latest distribution releases.

# deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main
# deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main

Next run the following commands to update the package database and to upgrade the distro.

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

That's it. This is pretty simple, but sometimes things go wrong... Yeah, well, good luck.