How not to bork your system because you can not upgrade your kernel

[skarphace]

I killed my debian system for the first time the other day by doing a dist-upgrade. It setup udev and it couldn't handle having the old kernel. Didn't help that I forgot I couldn't upgrade the kernel...

I would appreciate anyone sharing their techniques on how they are keeping this from happening. How do you keep your debian system up to date without destroying it?

[GuyPatterson]

Use only main for your distro... ie:

[415][nydc ~]:# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main 
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main 

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main 
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main 

deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main 
deb-src http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main 
[416][nydc ~]:#

And...

[416][nydc ~]:# aptitude update ; aptitude safe-upgrade

Can also comment everything out but the security repos if you want just security patches.