Installing Debian Squeeze

Debian Squeeze is testing, not unstable. Sid is unstable. Also, Etch is oldstable now; Lenny is stable.

You can run your own kernel (say, one from Sid) as long as it supports pv_ops. See the wiki for more on running your own kernel.

Alternately, you can run one of the Linode-provided kernels and just run everything else from Sid.

Man, I messed that post all up! Thank you for correcting my Debian mind wipe. :)

I want to run testing (Squeeze) not unstable (Sid) because I find that stable gets a bit too long in the tooth for me and I rely on more up-to-date packages (Ruby 1.9) for my stuff. I don't really want to run my own kernel, too much danger down that path.

What I think I need to do is install Debian 5 (stable), upgrade it to Squeeze (via apt sources.list) and use it as normal. If I go down this road are there any Linode special things I have to worry about? Kernel modules? XEN upgrades? etc…

Based on my experience of upgrading Etch from Lenny, there's nothing Linode-specific about the process. You might want to do it from LISH, though, because sometimes the upgrade process wants to stop and restart SSH.