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Debian OS Upgrades

An in-place upgrade is only recommended for experienced users.

Debian does support in-place upgrades of the operating system and, in general, all core AllStarLink packages will properly upgrade between supported versions. Third-party applications and scripts may not work properly or at all without additional upgrades for those.

Official Upgrade Instructions

The official Debian upgrade from Debian 12 to 13 can be found in the Debian 13 Release Notes.

  1. Login to Debian and become root with sudo -s. All commands following this are run as root.

  2. Ensure that all of the latest Bookworm packages are installed: 

    apt update
apt upgrade -y
apt dist-upgrade -y

    It is not necessary to reboot into a new kernel if installed.

  3. Change the apt configuration to pull packages from the Trixie release:

    perl -pi -e 's/bookworm/trixie/g' \
    /etc/apt/sources.list \
    /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

  4. Perform an update of the Debian package information:

    apt update

    If the last few lines complain about the following: 

    N: Skipping acquire of configured file 'main/binary-armhf/Packages' as repository 'https://repo.allstarlink.org/public trixie InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'armhf'
N: Skipping acquire of configured file 'beta/binary-armhf/Packages' as repository 'https://repo.allstarlink.org/public trixie InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'armhf'
N: Skipping acquire of configured file 'devel/binary-armhf/Packages' as repository 'https://repo.allstarlink.org/public trixie InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'armhf'

    Then remove the "armhf" architecture legacy configuration with: 

    dpkg --remove-architecture armhf
apt update

  5. Begin the upgrade-process first stage install: 

    apt upgrade -y

    If you are prompted about restarting services it is safe to choose "Yes".

    DO NOT reboot after this step.

  6. Begin the upgrade-process second stage install: 

    apt dist-upgrade -y

  7. Reboot the system with the reboot command.

  8. Login to Debian and become root with sudo -s.

  9. Remove obsolete packages related to Debian 12: 

    apt autoremove -y

  10. Remove all legacy package data or other information that is no longer needed:

    apt purge -y $(dpkg -l | grep -E '^rc' | awk '{print $2}')

  11. Run asl-check-install and look for any installation problems.

  12. Test out your Asterisk/app_rpt system and any other applications.