Thursday, June 18, 2026

Upgrading from Proxmox VE 8 to 9, Debian 12 to 13, PBS 3 to 4, and LMDE 6 to 7

Proxmox VE 9 has been out for a while, and it is based on Debian 13, which has also been released for a while. However, other than my main server (a ML110 Gen9) running on Proxmox VE 8, all other parts of my homelab are not standard installations. My Proxmox Backup Server has a concurrent Proxmox VE installation. My Fujitsu Celsius M740 Proxmox workstation that was installed with XFCE desktop on top of Proxmox VE 7 originally. For my main workstation running on a Ryzen 7 5700G, I had previously installed Proxmox VE 7 on Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 and then dual upgraded it from Proxmox VE 7 to 8 and Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 to 6. It was going to be painful to upgrade all of them to the latest version of Proxmox VE and Debian/LMDE.
 
Still, I knew I had to do it, and with a bit of time yesterday, I steeled my resolve and went ahead.
 
I used the official guides and my previous attempts as references.
Upgrade from 8 to 9 (for Proxmox VE)
Upgrade from 3 to 4 (for Proxmox Backup Server) 
 
The actual upgrade process was more a case of changing the source.list files in /etc/apt so that they use trixie (Debian 13) instead of bookworm (Debian 12), and gigi (LMDE 7) instead of faye (LMDE 6). After which, I ran
apt update
apt dist-upgrade  
Once again, repeated use of 
apt -f install
dpkg --configure -a
apt dist-upgrade
helped me to finally get everything upgraded.
 
 
 
The main server seems to be running stably on Proxmox VE 9 with Linux kernel 7.0.6. However, the main workstation with Ryzen 7 5700G suddenly rebooted while on kernel 7.0.6. So, I decided to roll back to kernel 6.8.12, which was previously running fine when it was on Proxmox VE 8.
 
 
 
The backup server seems to be fine too.
 
 
 
The Fujitsu workstation is not used much, so I am not sure how stable it is.
 
Also, for the workstations, given that they have the LMDE repos installed due to my love for having Linux Mint icons, I faced the same issue where Proxmox does not recognise the version codename "Gigi" (which is LMDE 7). It causes the error message "unknown Debian code name 'gigi' (500)" and so I had to edit /usr/lib/os-release and change
VERSION_CODENAME=gigi
to
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie 
 
I guess I should not have to do this again, hopefully, for a couple years more.

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