Hi all,
in case anyone is interested, here’s a short step-by-step tutorial to upgrade Debian Bookworm to Debian Trixie.
DISCLAIMER
While Debian officially supports in-place upgrades from Bookworm to Trixie, and the process is well-documented, a stable and fresh install of Debian Trixie followed by a restore of your openHAB backup is the safer and more robust approach.
1. Make Sure the System Is Up to Date
Before upgrading, update and upgrade all existing packages:
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
2. Edit sources.list for Debian Trixie
Change all references from bookworm to trixie in:
/etc/apt/sources.list
Also update any files in:
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/
For example, I updated the raspi.list file
3. Refresh Package Index
Once sources are updated, run:
sudo apt update
4. Upgrade to Debian 13 (Trixie)
Now perform the full upgrade with this command:
sudo apt full-upgrade -y \
-o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" \
-o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" \
--purge --auto-remove rpd-wayland-all+ rpd-x-all+
This command must be typed exactly as shown. Make particular note of the plus signs at the end of rpd-wayland-all and rpd-x-all.
For trixie, the raspberrypi-ui-mods package has been obsoleted; this has been replaced with a number of new packages containing configuration information that make the configuration of an image more modular; among other things, these two new packages contain the configuration that used to be in ui-mods, and a trixie image will not be correctly configured without them.)
5. Reboot
After the upgrade completes, reboot your system.
[OPTIONAL] Install fastfetch and Verify
Debian 13 includes fastfetch, a modern and faster alternative to neofetch.
Install it with:
sudo apt install fastfetch
Final Thoughts
While Bookworm is EOL in 2028, Trixie is currently the only distro that comes with openjdk-21-jdk (21.0.8+9-1). This upgrade went smoothly on my end.
Please do let me know if anyone experiences issues upgrading from Debian 12 to 13.