Live-cd upgrade

The facility to "live-cd' upgrade an aptosid installation does not exist. Before proceeding with installing aptosid BACK-UP YOUR DATA! including your bookmarks and emails.

It is highly recommended that you have a separate data partition. The benefits in terms of disaster recovery, stability of your data are unmeasurable.

Therefore your $HOME becomes a place where basic application configurations are kept. or to put it another way, a container for applications to store their settings.

ALWAYS BACK-UP YOUR DATA including your bookmarks and emails!

Hard Disk Installed Dist-Upgrade

The upgrade of an installed system is achieved through "dist-upgrade", to ensure that you have the latest versions of packages and security updates from here on in. It is extremely important to first check which packages will be upgraded:

With aptosid its called 'dist-upgrade' and is done over the net

The only supported method to dist-upgrade is as follows:

## Log out of KDE.  
## Go to Textmode by doing Ctrl+Alt+F1
## logon as root, and then type:
service kdm stop  ##If using another window manager replace kdm, for example with gdm
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get clean
service kdm start ##If using another window manager replace kdm, for example with gdm

The Reasons to use apt-get for a dist-upgrade

Package managers like adept, aptitude, synaptic and kpackage are not always able to account for the huge amount of changes which happen in Sid (depedency changes, name changes, maintainer script changes, ...). That's not the fault of the developers of those tools though, they write a excellent tools and fabulous for the debian stable branch, they are simply just not suitable for the very special needs of Debian Sid.

Use whatever you like to search for packages, but stick with apt-get for actually installing/removing/dist-upgrading

Package managers like adept, aptitude, synaptic and kpackage are at the least, non-deterministic (for complex package selection), mix that with a quickly moving target like sid and even worse an external repository of questionable quality (we don't use or recommend those, but they're a reality on your user systems) and you will be courting disaster. The other item to note is that all of these types of GUI package managers need to run in init 5, and/or, in X, and in doing a dist-upgrade in init 5 and/or X , (or even an 'upgrade' which is not recommended), you will end up damaging up your system beyond repair, maybe not today or tomorrow, in time you will.

apt-get on the other hand strictly does what it is asked to do, if there is any breakage you can pinpoint and debug/ fix the cause, if apt-get wants to remove half of the system (due to library transitions) it's the admin's call (that means you) to have at least a serious look.

This is the reason why debian builds use apt-get, not the other package manager tools.