Pi13 upgrade from Jessie 8 to Stretch 9 - performed 15/12/20

History

Upgraded my raspberry pi 13, which I think had a minimal install Raspbian, Debian i.e. has no desktop installed. The Pi had a PiFaceIO board installed, refer to my previous HPR episode Hpr2901

Backup process, in case something went wrong

I first moved all the unnecessary files to free up as much space as possible

Shrunk the Pi partition on the installed 128GB SD card down to 25106MB (24.52GB), (25708544K), 26,325,549,056 bytes using partition magic

I calculated that this would be 51,417,088 blocks of 512 bytes

I used dd to make an image file and grabbed some unallocated space after partition by using count=55417088, refer to the command below

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/stuart/pi-13-img-backup.img bs=512 count=55417088

I used the following command to image files to a spare 64GB SD card

sudo dd if=/home/stuart/pi-13-img-backup.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512 status=progress

I then expanded the partition to fill the full 64GB of the card

Booted from the 64GB card to make sure that I had a backup in case anything went wrong

Removed the 64GB card which I can go back to if things don't work out

Booted from 128GB card and expanded the partition using Gparted to fill 128GB SD card

I used the 128GB SD card to perform the upgrade, remember I have 64GB card to fall back on if things go wrong

Upgrade process

Source of information below

Step 1: Check available disk space

In order to update to Raspbian Stretch, there must be enough space on the SD card. Therefore you should check the available and used disk space usage first:

$ df -h

Step 2: Check package status

You must also check that all packages are in a state that is suitable for upgrade. The following command displays all packages that have the status semi-installed or configuration failed, and those with error status:

$ sudo dpkg --audit
$ sudo dpkg --get-selections | grep hold

Step 3: Update system

Before upgrading, the Raspbian should be completely updated:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Step 4: Modify Release

For upgrading to the new Raspbian version, the package lists must be adapted to the "Stretch" release. To do this, only the word "jessie" has to be replaced by "stretch". In order not to overlook any position, we simply let the replacement be done by the following command:

$ sudo sed -i /deb/s/jessie/stretch/g /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo sed -i /deb/s/jessie/stretch/g /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list

Step 5: Updating package lists

The new package lists must then be updated and imported:

$ sudo apt-get update

Step 6: Update to "Stretch"

Now we are ready to start the upgrade:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Step 7: Clean up installation

Old, unnecessary packages are removed after the system update with the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get autoremove
$ sudo apt-get autoclean

What was reported during upgrade

repo for get_iplayer no longer available so had to comment them out. On my Pi these were located at the following location.

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/packages.hedgrows.org.uk.list

change to lsb_release command

The lsb_release command no longer worked so after the upgrade I could not use it to check what version of Debian I was running.

Link to alternative methods to check installed Debian version.

I chose the following method

cat /etc/os-release

.bashrc - kept my original file

Something about /etc/login.defs & /etc/login.defs.dpkg-new

lots of changes in new version of ssh

Something was mentioned about apt hashes sha1 weak "yes" & apt hashes ripe-md/160 weak "yes"

Something about ~/.ssh/authorized_keys & ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Something about key length and accepted key types

What went wrong after the upgrade

mocp wouldn't run

I had to modify my config file in .moc folder I added the following line near the top of the file

ALSAStutterDefeat = no

In my .moc folder I had to also modify the my_keymap file at line 82. I think the next_search option is not available in the new version of moc 2.6-alpha3 installed with Debian Stretch. I commented out the following

#next_search =          ^g ^n

pifacedigitalio test.py reported an error

multiple errors reported last line of error was:-

pifacedigitalio.core.NoPiFaceDigitalDetectedError: No PiFace Digital board detected (hardware_addr=0, bus=0, chip_select=0)

I changed the first line of my python script

from

#!/usr/bin/env python

to

#!/usr/bin/env python3

This removed the original error. I stupidly thought this had solved the problem so I went about converting my script to run with Python 3 only to find at the end once I had correct everything that I ended up with the same original error.

How I solved the pifacedigitalio test.py reported error

The problem was solved by looking at this post

According to the post it had something to do with the SPI serial speed changing from 500Khz to 125Mhz

Problem was solved by modifying a file spi.py

I found the location of the file by using the following command

find / -iname spi.py

The files were located at

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pifacecommon/spi.py
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pifacecommon/spi.py

I created a copy of the original file and called it spi.py.bak

I only modified the file in python2.7 as my program test.py runs in python2.7

I added a comma to the end of line 68 and added the following line to line 69

speed_hz=ctypes.c_uint32(15000)

SSH from pifacecad stopped working

My Raspberry pi "Pi10" downstairs would not SSH into my Pi13 server upstairs This made it impossible for me to remotely start and stop podcasts and audiobooks playing on my Pi13 upstairs.

This happened because the downstairs Pi10 had DSA and RSA keys and it was using DSA keys to ssh into Pi13. I found this by looking at /var/logs/auth.log on Pi13 The log reported

userauth_pubkey: key type ssh-dss not in PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes

SSH from EEEPC stopped working

Was not able to SSH into Pi13 from EEEpc

My EEEPC netbook only had DSA keys and that is what it was using to try and SSH into Pi13 I generated new RSA keys and added them to Pi13, this solved the problem and allowed me to ssh into Pi13 from the EEEpc