updating.md

Updating and Upgrading Raspbian

First, update your system's package list by entering the following command in LXTerminal or from the command line:

sudo apt-get update

Next, upgrade all your installed packages to their latest versions with the command:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Generally speaking, doing this regularly will keep your installation up to date, in that it will be equivalent to the latest released image available from raspberrypi.org/downloads.

However, there are occasional changes made in the Foundation's Raspbian image that require manual intervention, for example a newly introduced package. These are not installed with an upgrade, as this command only updates the packages you already have installed.

Updating the kernel and firmware

The kernel and firmware are installed as a Debian package, and so will also get updates when using the procedure above. These packages are updated infrequently (after extensive testing); if you want to try more recent experimental software, it's also easy to update to the latest available version using the rpi-update tool.

To run this update, simply run from the command line:

sudo rpi-update

You'll need the latest version of the tool, so make sure you've recently run apt-get update and upgrade first.

Your system date/time will need to be accurate too, or it will fail to communicate with the server. To manually set your system time, run the following command (with the actual time and date):

sudo date -s "8 JAN 2015 12:00:00"

Running out of space

When running sudo apt-get upgrade, it will show how much data will be downloaded and how much space it will take up on the SD card. It's worth checking with df -h that you have enough disk space free, as unfortunately apt will not do this for you. Also be aware that downloaded package files (.deb files) are kept in /var/cache/apt/archives. You can remove these in order to free up space with sudo apt-get clean.