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Computers & Hardware => Other Technologies & Hardware => Topic started by: tiffy on February 03, 2018, 08:57:02 PM

Title: Upgrading Raspbian Jessie to Stretch
Post by: tiffy on February 03, 2018, 08:57:02 PM
One old RPi Mk 1B and two RPi Zero W's, all running DSLStats to MDWS, all running Raspbian Jessie without any issues.
(3 different users, lines)

Question, should I bother to upgrade the operating system to Stretch ?

I carried out a trial run on a spare RPi 3 using instructions here:
https://linuxconfig.org/raspbian-gnu-linux-upgrade-from-jessie-to-raspbian-stretch-9

Was quite a long procedure even on the RPi 3, would imagine it would be much longer on my RPi Mk 1 B or the RPi Zero's.
DSLStats still ran OK after the upgrade but Wi-Fi support was missing, an issue frequently reported on the instructions I followed.

I did not investigate further as I came to the conclusion that Stretch would be of little benefit over Jessie as my application requirements are only one service (DSLStats) and very limited utilities.

I could of course carry out a full clean install of Stretch which would likely work but again don't think it's worth the effort for extra program facilities I don't need and would likely put more pressure on my somewhat modest RPi's. 
Title: Re: Upgrading Raspbian Jessie to Stretch
Post by: burakkucat on February 03, 2018, 09:45:47 PM
No.  :no:

Just ensure that you keep the current OS up-to-date. When it goes EOL (end of life) then perform a clean installation of the current long term support version.

As for keeping the OS up-to-date, I perform the following (once per month) --

aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade
aptitude autoclean
Title: Re: Upgrading Raspbian Jessie to Stretch
Post by: tiffy on February 03, 2018, 11:53:46 PM
b*cat, thanks for the tips.

Yes, I do carry out fairly frequent system updates especially before any DSLStats program revision changes.
I must admit the commands you listed are unfamiliar to me, lots of things Linux are, I would normally use:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Title: Re: Upgrading Raspbian Jessie to Stretch
Post by: burakkucat on February 04, 2018, 12:35:20 AM
"sudo" will elevate your powers to that of the super-user as a one-off for the command line. I operate my R-Pi headless and access it via "ssh" as "root", hence I have no need to use "sudo".

As for my usage of "aptitude" compared with your usage of "apt-get" I'll leave it with you . . . "man aptitude" and "man apt-get" are the two commands I'll suggest you invoke.  ;)
Title: Re: Upgrading Raspbian Jessie to Stretch
Post by: tiffy on February 04, 2018, 07:00:03 PM
No.  :no:

Just ensure that you keep the current OS up-to-date. When it goes EOL (end of life) then perform a clean installation of the current long term support version.

As for keeping the OS up-to-date, I perform the following (once per month) --

aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade
aptitude autoclean


Yes, I had a play with the commands you suggested, prefixed by sudo in my case, on my RPi 3 test bed now running the updated Stretch OS.

sudo aptitude safe-upgrade initially produced errors and suggested applying suffix --full-resolver
This cured the errors and subsequent command applications did not require the --full-resolver suffix or produce any further errors.

I bow to your superior Linux knowledge and appreciate the assistance, will deploy this method in future, many thanks.