Recently I became aware that there was an update to my favorite Linux, Debian. I have been using Debian Jessie 8.2 on my laptop (Dell XPS 14) since it came out and honestly I did not have any problems at all.

But recently I was requested to install a Linux server for a small app developed on Ruby on Rails. And honestly my first choice is, and probably always be Debian; unfortunately when I came to the meeting with the good folks who wanted my assistance, I was informed that the server was already installed and that the developer installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it. Well that shouldn’t be much of a problem, after all is Debian at heart.

But due to many issues with it (performance and others), I wiped the install and did a Debian Jessie 8.2 install on the beautiful Dell server. Everything went well during the installation, but the error stroke after the first boot 🙁 video issues all over the place. I couldn’t see the console or screen due to some odd conflicts with the drivers and the Matrox video card. I did see several issues and complaints on some forums about the same that I was experiencing, but it has its positive side. The developer was using this server as a workstation and had the GUI installed and used tools like Atom and other things and was going to use the server to do the training. And now with the issues with video, I had the perfect excuse to make him use his laptop. #Win for me.

Today, I was happy to read that many video issues have been patched with 8.3 and I intend to do the upgrade on the server tomorrow night. But I did try to do the upgrade on my computer and everything went well.

How to upgrade to Debian 8.3 from Debian 8.x?

The process itself is pretty easy, on your terminal using an account with sudo rights, run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

This command will request all the latest versions from all the repositories that you have on setup on your sources.list.

sudo apt-get upgrade

The upgrade modifier on apt-get compares the latest versions of software on the catalog available online against the local catalog of installed software on your machine, and tells you which are the ones that you can upgrade to newer versions.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The dist-upgrade modifier, besides doing the same thing as upgrade it also changes the dependencies with newer version of packages. It will prioritize the most important packages to upgrade.

sudo reboot

After the reboot your computer should be now running full Debian 8.3 and you can verify it by running the following command:

lsb_release -a

The output should be something like this:

Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 8.3 (jessie)
Release: 8.3
Codename: jessie

And there you go, Debian Jessie 8.3 installed, enjoy!

If you face errors or have questions, let me know!

PS: Thanks to Christian Torres for the correction!