Updating Raspbian

Raspbian is based on Debian. Upgrading it to the latest version is done the same way as upgrading a normal Debian distribution. To not make this my shortest blog ever, I’ll show how I upgrade one of my Raspberry Pi.

The upgrade to release N is performed by starting the process release N-1. For each upgrade:

1. Update current release
2. Prepare configuration for next release
3. Run upgrade
4. Clean up
5. Validate result of upgrade

Update your current Raspbian

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt full-upgrade

Prepare configuration for next Raspbian version

Edit repository files and change the distribution name to stretch or buster, depending from where you are upgrading from. A list of releases for Raspbian can be found at the Wikipedia page.

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

To update to stretch:

sources.list:

deb http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian stretch main contrib non-free rpi

To update to buster:

sources.list:

deb http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian buster main contrib non-free rpi

Note

You may have more repository servers configured. For instance, check the content of the file: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list.

Make sure to enable IPv6 support.

Acquire::ForceIPv4 "false";

Run upgrade

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

Sample output for update to stretch

Sample output for update to buster

Clean up

sudo apt autoremove

Validate result of upgrade

After running the above commands again, they should not report any more updates or dependencies.

sudo apt dist-upgrade

Check Debian version

more /etc/os-release

The entries for version and codename should now match your targeted release. For buster, it is:

VERSION_ID=”10”
VERSION_CODENAME=buster