After a lot of work updating packages and testing, we are now at a point where the packages in our public trixie repo can be used to update a bookworm image to trixie, and are herewith providing the instructions to do so.
Beforehand, I need to stress a few things. First, we will never officially recommend or support doing this - our recommended approach will always be to start with a clean trixie image and to install whatever programs and data you need from the previous bookworm image. While we do what we can to make sure that it is possible to upgrade a bookworm image, we can only test clean images; we cannot test every combination of software and configuration that a user might have applied, and any such changes can cause the update to fail in a fashion we could not predict which may leave you with a broken and unrecoverable system. You should not attempt to upgrade any system on which you are relying, and you should not attempt to upgrade any system without taking a full backup first. We are not responsible if this process does result in a broken image - all we can say is that the upgrade process described here has been repeatedly tested and found to work on the most recent clean bookworm image.
It is probably also worth reading Debian's official guidance on updating from bookworm to trixie, which can be found here : https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/ ... ng.en.html
With all that said, if you do want to try upgrading to trixie - and we would be grateful if some of you did, as it will doubtless find issues which we have not come across yet - here is how to do it.
1. Start with a bookworm image running the desktop under labwc, and make sure it is up to date with all recent changes by doing
2. Update the apt configuration for trixie.
In the file /etc/apt/sources.list, change every reference to "bookworm" to "trixie".
Do the same in every file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ - on a clean image, this will only involve the file raspi.list, but if you have added any other repositories to this directory, their list files should also be updated.
3. Run an apt update
4. Upgrade to trixie
This line must be entered exactly as above. Make particular note of the plus signs at the end of rpd-wayland-all and rpd-x-all. (For trixie, we have obsoleted the raspberrypi-ui-mods package; this has been replaced with a number of new packages containing configuration information which make the configuration of an image more modular; among other things, these two new packages contain the configuration which used to be in ui-mods, and a trixie image will not be correctly configured without them.)
On a Pi 5 with a fast connection, the trixie upgrade takes approximately 10 minutes to run. While it is running, you will be prompted to ask whether to restart services - answer "yes" to this question; you should not have to interact with the process other than that.
At the end, assuming the process completed without errors, it is worth running a "sync" just to make sure the file system has cleared all its caches, and then reboot. When the desktop comes back, you can confirm that you are now running trixie by opening a terminal and typing "lsb_release -c".
Good luck, and many thanks to those of you who try it! (If you do not want to try upgrading, we will be making trixie beta images available in the next couple of weeks.)
Beforehand, I need to stress a few things. First, we will never officially recommend or support doing this - our recommended approach will always be to start with a clean trixie image and to install whatever programs and data you need from the previous bookworm image. While we do what we can to make sure that it is possible to upgrade a bookworm image, we can only test clean images; we cannot test every combination of software and configuration that a user might have applied, and any such changes can cause the update to fail in a fashion we could not predict which may leave you with a broken and unrecoverable system. You should not attempt to upgrade any system on which you are relying, and you should not attempt to upgrade any system without taking a full backup first. We are not responsible if this process does result in a broken image - all we can say is that the upgrade process described here has been repeatedly tested and found to work on the most recent clean bookworm image.
It is probably also worth reading Debian's official guidance on updating from bookworm to trixie, which can be found here : https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/ ... ng.en.html
With all that said, if you do want to try upgrading to trixie - and we would be grateful if some of you did, as it will doubtless find issues which we have not come across yet - here is how to do it.
1. Start with a bookworm image running the desktop under labwc, and make sure it is up to date with all recent changes by doing
Code:
sudo apt updatesudo apt full-upgradeIn the file /etc/apt/sources.list, change every reference to "bookworm" to "trixie".
Do the same in every file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ - on a clean image, this will only involve the file raspi.list, but if you have added any other repositories to this directory, their list files should also be updated.
3. Run an apt update
Code:
sudo apt updateCode:
sudo apt full-upgrade -y -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" --purge --auto-remove rpd-wayland-all+ rpd-x-all+On a Pi 5 with a fast connection, the trixie upgrade takes approximately 10 minutes to run. While it is running, you will be prompted to ask whether to restart services - answer "yes" to this question; you should not have to interact with the process other than that.
At the end, assuming the process completed without errors, it is worth running a "sync" just to make sure the file system has cleared all its caches, and then reboot. When the desktop comes back, you can confirm that you are now running trixie by opening a terminal and typing "lsb_release -c".
Good luck, and many thanks to those of you who try it! (If you do not want to try upgrading, we will be making trixie beta images available in the next couple of weeks.)
Statistics: Posted by spl23 — Tue Jul 01, 2025 7:03 am