add repos apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade answer the questions. Most will be "do you want old version of file, distro maintainer version of file,

add repos apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade answer the questions. Most will be "do you want old version of file, distro maintainer version of file, or do you want to diff or edit it". If you don't want to answer the questions and just want to keep only config that you changed: export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::='--force-confdef' -o Dpkg::Options::='--force-confold' dist-upgrade (we use that because our configs are managed by CM Puppet anyway) That will: if you have not changed system config in a given package, update config file to latest * if you have changed it, it will preserve it but put new one into .dpkg-dist file. If you did not add any non-debian repos that would collide it pretty much always succeeds. Now: * find any file ending with .dpkg-dist * inspect both this and config to see whether you want to put some of new config into your current config That looks longer than it is. Near-every upgrade I did is just those 3 commands and some waiting.