How to change from Raspbian Jessie to Stretch?

Community Graveyard WD Labs Products
1

The NOOBS version I received with my ‘WD PiDrive Foundation Edition USB Flash’ installs Raspbian Jessie. How can I use a newer NOOBS version which will install the new Raspbian Stretch?
The website https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/ recommends a fresh install of Stretch since an upgrade of Jessie is not guaranteed to work.

2

I have been searching for how to do this and have not yet found a way. If anyone knows, please help. Thank you.

As a workaround, I was able to upgrade jessie to stretch per the instructions below, but I would prefer a clean install of stretch.

To upgrade, first modify the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list. In both files, change every occurrence of the word ‘jessie’ to ‘stretch’. (Both files will require sudo to edit.)

Then open a terminal window and execute

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

3

Funny thing is that when I do:
sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

I get the same response as if I just typed:
sudo apt-get upgrade

i.e.
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Calculating upgrade… Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

and Raspbian remains in version jessie

4

You need to update your lists. Here is a fantastic tutorial on how to do it.

5

Thanks for the tip Westeros. Looks indeed like a thourough instruction. I’ll give it a try.

6

This update procedure seems to have worked for me although I had to do:
sudo apt-get install rpi-update
for ‘rpi-update’ to be recognized as a valid command.

Also, there are numerous warnings on the net against using rpi-update if you are not an experienced programmer, but so far it looks as if it has done no harm to my system.

7

Using “rpi-update” is highly discouraged. It installed beta firmware that can prevent your Pi from booting.

I have released a fully updated community edition of the Foundation (NOOBS) software. This includes Raspbian Stretch and updated firmware for the Raspberry Pi B+.

https://github.com/PiDrive/CommunityFoundationEdition

It is also possible to update to Stretch from a Jessie installation.

sudo sed -i "s/jessie/stretch/g" /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo sed -i "s/jessie/stretch/g" /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

More information can be found here.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/

8

Thanks for this information Nilpo. Very useful.

1 Like