On Sun, 14 Jul 2019 22:24:39 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> Haven't I read recommendations to do a clean install of Buster rather
> than trying to upgrade by changing the repository list...
>
I read those too, but merely did my weekly backup as usual and followed
this up with an upgrade in situ by following the instructions given by
the RPI foundation.

See the "Buster out of testing, update requires action" thread for my
comments and niggles about the process, but the bottom line is that my
old 512MB RPi B system is running Buster as I write.

Make a full backup (use dd to copy both partitions on your current SD
card to a new SD card) before you do anything else.

Also note that I run my RPi headless via SSH sessions from a laptop
running Fedora Linux and that I found it very useful to run the upgrade
in one console window and have another open for editing  non-standard RPi
config files, looking at RPi man pages, etc.

I found the upgrade pretty straight forward even though apt stopped
(twice IIRC) before completing the upgrade. In all cases simply rerunning
the same command made the upgrade continue, so the end result was a
successful upgrade from Stretch to Buster. So, some warnings and
suggestions:

- you should definitely do an upgrade on Stretch and then reboot before
  starting the upgrade in situ.

- I've been doing this sort of Fedora in-situ upgrade for several years
  now and its evident that Fedora does this much better than Raspbian.

  Fedora does not stop if it finds a user-modified config, but
  automatically applies the changes needed to bring it into line with the
  new Linux version while Raspbian pauses the upgrade, presents options
  and waits for you to deal with the issue.

  The options are sensible and include diffing the file versions and
  letting you edit the new version. This is OK, but it does need you to
  keep an eye on the upgrade and take these actions as they arise.

- I found that having a second console window open was useful because I
  could see the diff report in the first window while fixing the config
  file in the second console, read man pages etc., but YMMV.

- I ran "apt autoremove" after the upgrade completed and this removed
  around 1000 redundant packages, saving a large amount of RAM.

- after the upgrade I replaced Exim (installed as part of Buster) with
  Postfix and also installed the logwatch package and both of these
  actions reported lists of redundant packages, causing me to run
  "apt autoremove" again after each of these installs.

- I would not try an upgrade in situ on an SD card thats less than
  8GB - I think its quite likely to run out of space on a smaller card.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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