Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update to F34 Beta on your Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert back if anything unforeseen happens.
Prior to the update to Fedora 34 Beta, apply any pending upgrades.
Updating using terminal
Because the Fedora 34 Beta is not available in GNOME Software, the whole upgrade must be done through terminal.
First, check if the 34 branch is available, which should be true now:
$ ostree remote refs fedora
You should see the following line in the output:
fedora:fedora/34/x86_64/silverblue
Next, rebase your system to the Fedora 34 branch.
$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/34/x86_64/silverblue
Finally, the last thing to do is restart your computer and boot to Fedora Silverblue 34 Beta.
How to revert
If anything bad happens — for instance, if you can’t boot to Fedora Silverblue 34 Beta at all — it’s easy to go back. Pick the previous entry in the GRUB boot menu, and your system will start in its previous state. To make this change permanent, use the following command:
$ rpm-ostree rollback
That’s it. Now you know how to rebase to Fedora Silverblue 34 Beta and back. So why not do it today?
I would love to update, but I cannot get it working:
Not sure what to do though. Removing
libvirt
doesn’t really seem to help:Wouldn’t it make more sense to rebase to
fedora:fedora/34/x86_64/testing/silverblue
since thetesting
repo is what workstation betas use by default?That command won’t work for users who have rpmfusion. There will be conflicts requiring users to uninstall rpm-fusion (and all packages installed from it) before the rebase and then reinstalling them again
This command will work in one go:
rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/34/x86_64/silverblue --uninstall rpmfusion-free-release-33-1.noarch --install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-branched.noarch.rpm --uninstall rpmfusion-nonfree-release-33-1.noarch --install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-branched.noarch.rpm
I’ve never had to remove the packages installed from RPM Fusion, just the packages that configure the repository.
I have libvirt layered on my installation of Silverblue and didn’t had any issue on rebase. I would try enabling
updates-testing
to see if this is solved.I never used it and the beta this way works fine. Is there any benefit this change could bring?
I don’t have rpm-fusion on my system, so didn’t know there could be any issue with it. Thanks for sharing the command.
Thank you for the idea. I reinstalled the system to rawhide two days ago - something I wanted to do anyways. This fixed a lot of issues for me and my system is now running under btrfs.