No, fixing a Debian OS update shouldn't require a reinstall!
Context
I have a draft article named "Fed up with Linux/Debian, moving all the things to FreeBSD!" which will contain a lot more details once published, but I wanted to have this one out as I just "fixed" one of my issues...
What happened
I have 2 RasperryPi with a touch screen which I'm using for home automation - essentially displaying Grafana dashboards on various things such as rooms temperatures or power usage.
While I regularly update packages on those machines, it had been a while that I
didn't update the Debian OS to its latest supported version.
They were still running Debian 10 (Buster), which was no longer supported, so I
figured out it would be better to upgrade to Debian 12 (Bookworm)
Good start
I didn't want to upgrade straight from Debian 10 to 12, so I first upgraded to Debian 11 (Bullseye), which went well.
Nothing unusual, you would think - and so did I, so I carried on and upgraded to Debian 12.
Then fail
When I finished upgraded, I rebooted, and then things started falling apart...
The touchscreen was not recognised anymore, then when I fixed it, I could not launch automatically the Window manager and have it open Chromium / Grafana automatically at boot.
What drove me (even more) crazy is that I somehow managed to fix one of the RPi configuration, but then I did another upgrade 2 weeks afterwards, and it broke again.
I spent countless hours trying to make the 2nd RPi to correctly launch X etc, to no avail.
Unwanted solution
In the end, I did what any sysadmin would hate doing: reinstall what should have been a perfectly working Linux workstation.
- reinstall the default RasperryPi OS
- reinstall the touch drivers
- recreate the
autostartscript
so in less than 10 minutes for each RPi, I got my problem solved...
Wrap Up
I know, this is a rant and I would normally not do it, but I spent too much time on something really basic and stupid.
I had similar issues with TWO other Debian servers, which I will detail in the aforementioned blog article, so stay tuned for that one...
Tags: IT