Raspberry PI OS: upgrading and cross-grading
Compared to the simple bullseye → bookworm upgrade, I’m not sure about this. The result? Yes, definitely, the system feels - weirdly - much more responsive, logged in over SSH. I guess the arm64 base architecture has some more efficient ops than the “lowest denominator armhf”, so to say (e.g. there was in the 32 bit version some rpi-custom package with string ops), and thus migrating to 64 bit makes more things “faster”, but this is subjective so it might be actually not true.
But from the point of view of the effort? Unless you like to play with dpkg and apt, and understand how these work and break, I’d rather say, migrate to ansible and automate the deployment. It’s doable, sure, and by the third system, I got this nailed down pretty well, but it was a lot of time spent.
The good aspect is that I did 3 migrations...
Hackaday:
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Raspberry Pi OS In-Place Upgrades, Not For The Faint Hearted
The Raspberry Pi series of boards are noted for their good software support, with a continuous flow of operating system upgrades such that an original Pi from 2012 will still boot the latest Pi OS. But these upgrades are best done by writing a fresh SD card, so oddly, the Pi remains surprisingly difficult in many cases to upgrade in place. [Iustin Pop] has taken a look at the problem, and finds that though it’s not always easy it remains possible with a bit or work.
An upgrade in place of a Raspberry Pi OS install that’s running on a headless device is probably the simplest of the lot, with a relatively small set of issues. Do it on a machine using the GUI though, and the switch from x.org to Wayland makes for a whole world of pain.
Perhaps most interesting for the insight it gives us into the way Raspberry Pi OS is derived from Debian, is the crossgrade process from the ARMhf build for earlier machines to the ARM64 one for the more recent ones. Here aside from a headache of differing paths and versions, he encounters the Pi-specific compilation tweaks put in place by the developers of Raspberry Pi OS, leading to the ARMhf version being a different branch from the original Debian than the ARM64 one.
The Register:
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Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool
Raspberry Pi OS has undergone more than a modest version upgrade including a new set of tools for writing it to a bootable SD card.
You might have missed it in the excitement over the announcement of the Raspberry Pi 5 at the end of September, but a couple of weeks later, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also updated Raspberry Pi OS. The new release is quite significantly different from previous versions, so we thought we should take it for a spin.
Raspberry Pi OS 5.0 is based on Debian 12 "Bookworm," with a completely new Wayland desktop environment replacing PIXEL, the older desktop based on LXDE and X.org, augmented with Mutter in its previous release. There's also a new version of the Raspberry Pi Imager available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, which not only writes to SD cards but can also download the OS image for you as well.