As part of getting ready for future developments, Elive has already set up repositories to allow a switch to Debian 11 Bullseye.

All existing Elive installations as well as the live version still use Debian 10 Buster as its base and will continue to do so until the shift is considered stable and foolproof. Enabling people to decide for themselves whether they want to try out and test this imminent shift, here's a small Howto explaining the steps I took to get there.

Upgrade steps:

  1. Make sure to fully upgrade your existing system using the 'apug' command in the terminal.

    • After which it would be a good idea to upgrade your (still Buster) kernel to the latest iteration in the same way as is explained in step 4 (for Bullseye). It will facilitate a lot of changes.

  1. Change the entries in '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list' to reflect the new Bullseye base. It should have the following entries:

    The Elive repositories require changing too. They're in '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/aaa-elive-list' and should contain:

    As well as '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ggg-marillat.list' to contain:

    Or if you want to be really lazy you could use the following command and make all the needed changes in one go by using the following (all in one line) command:

    sudo sed -i -e 's/buster/bullseye/g; s/bullseye\/updates/bullseye-security/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list

  2. After checking that the sources list files are changed correctly you can run the 'apug' command again.

    • if this returns an error then re-check the mentioned lists/repos for errors.

And get yourself a beverage or something because there will be quite a lot of packages to download and install and .... there will be a few (2-3) questions asked, which in general can answered with the set default (y or save) as well.

  1. Upgrade your kernel manually as the upgrader (apug) will not do that for you. First check out which kernel you currently have with:

    'uname -a'

    where essentially the extension is of importance, like: "bpo.2-amd64". (the number behind the bpo may differ)

    You can then search for the most recent available kernel for Buster with the command:

    'apse linux-image | grep bpo'

    and subsequently chose the latest version (currently 5.14.0-0) and conform to the found extension and install that with

    'api linux-image-5.14.0-0.bpo2-amd64 linux-headers-5.14.0-0.bpo2-amd64'

  2. And reboot your system into your new kernel.

Post-upgrade fixes

Now there are still a few minor issues that we know of for Elive specifically.

And even more known issues for Debian in general: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes/ch-information

  1. The sound card may not work and might require a work around with:

    systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket killall -9 pulseaudio rm -f /home/*/.config/pulse/cookie /home/*/.pulse/* audio-configurator systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

  1. In Bullseye python2 has been removed and superseded by python3. To change all bindings to reflect python3 you need to install th 'python-is-python3' package:

    'api python-is-python3'

  2. If you like playing retro games, specifically 'syusokoban' you'll need to re-install it as the previous one was an i386 version. Thus:

    apr --purge syasokoban api syasokoban

All the above fix commands, can be shortened down to one go, from user:

 

And have a look round your shiny new Bullseye based Elive system and have fun.

If you do encounter any bugs or problems please take notes and tell us about them in the Elive forum thread: https://forum.elivelinux.org/t/installing-bullseye-over-buster-on-elive-beta so that we can resolve them.