Notes for upgrading RaspberryPi from Raspbian Wheezy to Raspbian Jessie

[gdt]

Debian distributions for the Raspberry Pis

The Raspian distribution is Debian recompiled and tuned for the ARM instruction set used in the original Raspberry Pi Model A, Model B, and Model B+.

The Raspberry Pi2 has a more recent ARM instruction set. That gives RaspberryPi2 users two paths to Debian Jessie: use the Raspbian distribution or use the stock Debian ARM distribution with a hack for the Raspberry Pi kernel.

This article is about upgrading an existing Raspbian Wheezy distribution to Raspbian Jessie. Some Linux systems administration skill is required to do this.

Alter /etc/apt/sources.list

Edit the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list replacing every occurance of "wheezy" with "jessie".

For example is /etc/apt/sources.list says:

deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ wheezy main contrib non-free rpi

then alter that to:

deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi

Similarly /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list contained:

deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy main

and this becomes:

deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ jessie main

The repository described by the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/collabora.list doesn't yet have a Jessie section.

Upgrade

The number of packages to upgrade will depend on how many packages you installed in addition to those which originally arrived with Raspbian Wheezy. In general, the mark is somewhere around 1GB of data.

Upgrades are best done from the old-fashioned text console. Press Crtl-Alt-F1 and login as root.

Enter:

# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
# apt-get autoremove

Do not reboot when that command completes. We'll fix a few of the more common issues with the upgrade at this most convenient moment.

Correct errors

udev rules

There are two files containing syntax errors in /lib/udev/rules.d/ which cause udev to fail to start: 60-python-pifacecommon.rules and 60-python3-pifacecommon.rules. These files are not owned by any packages, which is a little annoying and naive of their authors. Rename them to stop udev attempting to read them and failing.

# cd /etc/udev/rules.d
# mv 60-python-pifacecommon.rules 60-python-pifacecommon.rules.failed
# mv 60-python3-pifacecommon.rules 60-python3-pifacecommon.rules.failed

ifplugd replaced by wicd

Networking of plugin interfaces is done using ifplugd in Wheezy. This is done using wicd in Jessie.

# apt-get purge ifplugd

systemd is the cgroups controller

The init system is done using System V-style scripts in Wheezy. This is done using systemd in Jessie.

Systemd uses control groups so that unexpected process stop is reported to systemd. In Linux a control group can only have one controlling process, which has to be systemd in Jessie. This isn't a poor outcome, as systemd makes a fine controller.

However if another process attempts to be the control groups controller then systemd can fail when starting processes. So remove any existing controllers:

# apt-get purge cgmanager cgroup-bin cgroup-tools libcgroup1

systemd is the init system

A package called systemd-shim allow other init systems to use logind and other programs, as systemd-shim provides just enough of systemd's function. Jessie uses systemd, so we don't need systemd-shim. Unfortunately the dist-upgrade seems to pull this in:

# apt-get purge systemd-shim

[Thanks to ktb on the RaspberryPi.org forums for correcting a typo here.]

Allow logging to the journal

systemd doubles the number of system loggers, by adding a new logger called journald. It can provide logs to the usual syslogd. However when debugging startup issues it can be useful to have journald write the files itself. To do this create the directory /var/log/journal/

journald keeps its logs in binary. Use journalctl -xb to see the logs. The -1 parameter is hand to view the log of the previous boot.

Consider booting in single user mode

You might choose to give yourself a way to debug startup issues by having the kernel start in single user mode. Edit /boot/cmdline.txt, appending the text single

The workflow here is:

• Boot RPi.

• Press Ctrl-D when asked for a password to enter single user mode. The boot will continue into multi-user mode.

• If this hangs then press Ctrl+Alt+Del to shut down.

• Restart RPi. This time provide the root password at the single user mode password prompt. Use journalctl to view the log of the previous boot and examine what went wrong.

• Correct the error, and use shutdown -r now to try again from the top.

Once you have sorted issues during system init then remove the single phrase from /boot/cmdline.txt so that the system boots into multiuser mode.

Reboot

Reboot and work through issues resulting from the upgrade.

Clean up

# apt-get clean

Journald is a enterprise-level logging solution, so it is keen on flushing data to disk. This radically increases the number of flash blocks written and this reduction in flash card lifetime isn't appreciated on the RPi. So it's probably best to remove /var/log/journal/* and allow journald to log to RAM and syslog instead.

Comments

No ethernet

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, this commandline broke my ethernet connection :

apt-get purge ifplugd

after reinstalling ifplugd, everything worked again

thanks

RE: No ethernet

[(Anonymous)]

For me also internet did not work. But after a little bit of searching it seems that the new systems needs:

auto eth0
in the
/etc/network/interfaces

I guess with ifplugd it works without.

upgrade from wheezy to jessie

[(Anonymous)]

well this must the 4th or 5th time i tried this following directions from other post to update raspbian from wheezy to jessie. yours though is the most thorough i've seen to date. everything looked fine and appeared to be working without problems until after i pulled the hard drive and backed up the root fs partition. (i've done this may times so i don't think i corrupted something) after that is when i started getting fsck errors (similar to past tries) during boot with fsck hanging up on /dev/sda2 (the data partition). the boot process stopped in single user and logged me in as root. but even running forced fsck on sda2 didn't fix it. every time i rebooted i got the same errors.

i looked it up on the raspberry pi forum (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=104314&p=720670) according to this post there apparently are problems with systemd still. i followed the suggestion to add init=/lib/sysvinit/init to the end of the /boot/cmdline.txt file. that at least did the fsck correctly and allowed me to boot it into multiuser. i'll soon find out over the next few days if that fixes the all the problems with jessie on raspbian.
thanks for the post.
John

Typo!

[(Anonymous)]

For example is /etc/apt/sources.list says:

For example if /etc/apt/sources.list says: