sudo apt dist-upgrade

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1

Hello,
What “sudo apt dist-upgrade” actually does?
I usually run:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade

and “sudo apt dist-upgrade” usually doesn’t do much.
I upgraded one of my systems yesterday and again “sudo apt dist-upgrade” didn’t do much.

Tonight I upgraded another system (still upgrading) and “sudo apt dist-upgrade” is doing a lot of upgrading for the first time in my memory.
What’s going on?

Thanks!

2

Hi,

You might ran into the same issue than me.

If you current system is a 32 bit, it’s the problem because SM dropped 32 bit support at the beginning of 2023. You can check with

uname -a

If you get sometinh like kernel version vl7 or something similar, you’re running 32 bit. If you get something like arm64, then it’s 64 bit and you’re good.

If the first case, you’re stuck and need to install a fresh 64 bit SM system.

This is not documented anywhere and I had to ask Jasem for help, which he did as always.

See https://www.indilib.org/forum/stellarmate/12745-solved-upgrade-to-bullseye.html

Hope it helps.

3

I am 64bit.
Upgrade went well. Just wondering why “sudo apt dist-upgrade” took much more time than usual next to zero.

4

upgrade: upgrades updated packages
dist-upgrade: performs a full release upgrade (a linux variant is called a “distribution”)

So if say, your repository was upgraded to a new major/minor version, it doesn’t only upgrade the software package files, but also the system base files.
You don’t want to happen this automatically, so “dist-upgrade” is a separate switch, in case you want to stay at a particular version of your distribution.
I only call it if a new Stellarmate OS version is out and i’m sure i backed up my current installation for fallback.

So with every main upgrade to the system (not only the programs and libraries), apt-get dist-upgrade “does much more”.

5

Thanks Mr!
That’s what I was suspecting..