This snip was originally created to document the arse-ache I had building my second Pi; it documented problems with Jesse & Stretch. The current release is buster and so much of this content is deprecated. In April 2020, I had reason to explore the code I use to maintain the currency of the apt cache. I have moved deprecated content to the comments and updated this post. For more, see below/overleaf. … 

At the end of the original page, I documented the use of a script to run the upgrade/updates but this is not a recommended process. I have amended it to only run the update and will need to further amend it, to post reminders to run the upgrade. (I am using notify-send on Ubuntu derivatives, and having some difficulty with this on Raspbian.)

1st Problem

I had big problems with APT, (the advanced packaging tool) updating Jessie to Jessie last, and then taking it onto Stretch on my Raspberry Pi. I must have needed to download and update over 2000 packages.  Some of this is documented in Raspberry PI Part Deux but I have created this snip to make it easier for others to find in order to help those that follow me. I found that an apt transaction would either hang, or cause the machine to reboot. I have not found a compelling solution but I have now completed the exercise. Here are my old notes.

oooOOoo

I used the apt tools either apt or apt-get. I used the CLI. I eventually uninstalled wolfram-engine because it was so big; its size jeopardised the downloads because I have a small SD card. (You might like to uninstall libreoffice as it’s so large and pretty unused on a Pi, at least by me.) Stretch is quite big.

I should document the hardware version, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2

Complete pain in the bum, it’d be useful to know why it fails in this way, so if you know add a comment.

I wrote a script in the hope it might be volume based, and needed to be reminded of apt-get’s interactive & batch switches.
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3 Replies

  1. I originally wrote as a first paragraph, I had big problems with APT, (the advanced packaging tool) updating Jessie to Jessie last, and then taking it onto Stretch on my Raspberry Pi. I must have needed to download and update over 2000 packages.  Some of this is documented in Raspberry PI Part Deux but I have created this snip to make it easier for others to find in order to help those that follow me. I found that an apt transaction would either hang, or cause the machine to reboot. I have not found a compelling solution but I have now completed the exercise.

  2. This article at the Raspberry PI site  describes upgrading the distro.

    Bloody hell. Is nice the answer to apt’s bad behaviour? It would seem not.

    I had some failures due to missing locales, this page helped. Can’t remember if I had to install locale-gen or update-locale.

    As I said, as I moved forward from a two year old Jessie OS image to Stretch, I find that often apt-get causes a hang or a reboot. There’s some stuff on google, but nothing fabulously compelling. Using nice still had problems. I used a combination of the following commands

    # dpkg --configure -a
    $ sudo nice apt-get dist-upgrade
    # apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
    # reboot
    # apt --fix-broken install
    # apt autoremove

    Anecdotally it seemed to often fail when updating systemd files

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