raspbian version

[erpomata]

How can I check the installed version of raspbian?


thanks
greetings

[mpthompson]

Raspbian doesn't really have a version in the traditional sense. Rather, Raspbian is a rebuild of the Debian Wheezy armhf repository and the 1000's of packages that comprise the repository are updated from time to time. The more pertinent question is whether your install of Raspbian (or rather the packages that comprise your install of Raspbian) is up to date. The best way of keeping Raspbian up to date with the latest packages is to periodically run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Different Raspbian images in the past are created against whatever packages were in the repository at that time. Running the two commands above will upgrade all installations of Raspbian to the latest packages no matter what image the original install was done from.

[ndoren]

Newbie question here, based on the response above. What is the purpose of rpi-update, and does this utility yield a different result than apt-get update/upgrade? Thanks. Neall

[Nr90]

Rpi-update gets the very latest firmware from github.
This is somewhat untested and if your firmware works well, one of the few reasons to use it is to help testing.

[sheriff076]

Does that mean the apt-get update and upgrade commands don't actually update the firmware, just packages? You still need to run rpi-update on Raspbian to get firmware releases?

[Nr90]

They do, but only the firmware available in the repositories you're using.
This depends on when the maintainers put it in there.
Generally they seem to wait a couple of weeks to get some testing done.
If you want the very latest firmware you could run RPi-update or use a new rep with the latest firmware, search the forum if you want this.

[jdbennet]

Newer kernels sometimes need newer firmware, so its wise to do an rpi-update before a dist-upgrade

[coolaj86]

Here's a few ways to do it:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y lsb-release
lsb_release -sri
Debian
7.8

Code: Select all

cat /etc/issue
Raspbian GNU/Linux 7 \n \l

Code: Select all

cat /etc/debian_version
7.8

[DarthBeta]

For some reason sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade didn't seem to work but rpi-update did.

[Taxicletter]

And what does

Code: Select all

 sudo BRANCH=next rpi-update

do?
I used it because someone adviced it because the openGL driver wasn't working anymore. But what the difference between that and the normal sudo rpi-update?

(Now I do sudo apt-get update, and then the sudo apt-get upgrade, but if I understand above well, it is better to do the sudo rpi-update before the upgrade?)

[kusti8]

And what does

Code: Select all

 sudo BRANCH=next rpi-update

do?
I used it because someone adviced it because the openGL driver wasn't working anymore. But what the difference between that and the normal sudo rpi-update?

(Now I do sudo apt-get update, and then the sudo apt-get upgrade, but if I understand above well, it is better to do the sudo rpi-update before the upgrade?)

It is best never to do rpi-update because it gets unstable firmware which can easily crash your Pi. BRANCH=next means to go more unstable or go to the next branch. It should never be done willy nilly.

[Taxicletter]

Thank you!