How to upgrade Devuan 3.1 to 4.0 Chimaera

Recently, I’ve discovered Devuan, a Debian GNU/Linux fork free of systemd. Soon after I installed Devuan and wrote an article about, they released a new version. So this article is about how to upgrade Devuan 3.1 Beowulf to 4.0 Chimaera.

sources.list

Our sources.list are pointing to the old-stable version Beowulf:

This task is as simple as change to ‘chimaera’ on every place that says ‘beowulf’. I’m also not using the source packages, disabling this entries saves me a couple of download kb.

For those who wants to copy&paste from here:

deb https://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera main
deb https://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera-updates main
deb https://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera-security main

Update available packages

As with any Debian-based linux distro, the second step is to run:

apt-get update

With apt-get update we re-synchronize the package index files from their sources.

Upgrading the packages and the distribution

The third step is run two more commands:

apt-get upgrade

apt-get dist-upgrade

From apt-get manpage:

• apt-get upgrade: Used to install the newest versions of all packages currently installed on the system. New versions of currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded without changing the install status of another package will be left at their current version.
• apt-get dist-upgrade: In addition to performing the function of upgrade, this option also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get has a “smart” conflict resolution system, and it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones, if necessary.

Pay attention that before the upgrade, if there are some news, they woulb be shown, for example:

Also, after the install of packages, during the configure phase apt-get could ask you questions:

In this case is asking me to restart some services without asking, this was a clean install, not in production yet so I’m ok. But you can leave this for the end and just reboot your system when you are ready to.

And you see that is that simple how to upgrade Devuan to the lastest release.