Upgrades


Table of Contents
1. Software Upgrades
1.1. Manual Upgrades

1. Software Upgrades

FreedomBox can automatically install security upgrades. On the Upgrades page of the Settings section in Plinth you can turn on automatic upgrades. For FreedomBox versions above 0.5, this feature is enabled by default and there is no manual action necessary. It is strongly recommended that you have this option enabled to keep your FreedomBox secure.

Upgrades are performed every day at night. If you wish to shutdown FreedomBox every day after use, keep it running at night once a week or so to let the automatic upgrades happen. Alternatively, you can perform manual upgrades as described below.


1.1. Manual Upgrades

In the Plinth web interface, you can initiate a manual upgrade process from Upgrades page of the Settings section. Note that once the upgrades start, it may take a long time to complete and Plinth may seem to wait for the page to load.

Under some circumstances, automatic upgrades may fail and require you perform a manual upgrade action. Even upgrades initiated from Plinth may not finish properly. This may be because the upgrade process requires you to make a decision. In these cases, manual upgrade on the terminal may be the only option.

In addition, while the upgrade task is running any application installations will wait until the upgrade task is finished. Depending on the hardware, the upgrade task may take a little time, therefore, giving the impression that the application installation stalled.

To perform manual upgrades on the terminal, login into FreedomBox on a terminal or using a remote secure shell (see Secure Shell section). Then run the following commands:

$ sudo su -
Password:
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade

This will ask you if it is alright to install/upgrade (or remove) some packages and use (or release) some disk space. Say yes after review. In some cases, during the upgrades process you will be asked questions about modified configuration files, answering with a default Keep current configuration is usually safe.