Headless RPi 3b+ upgrade to buster / CLI (Nov release)

is there a README / HowTo to upgrade OSMC from the June release to the Nov release via CLI only?

This is if for a headless system used as a music server/streamer, with a hifiberry card.

For the last couple of years I updated the system doing the usual:
apt update
apt full-upgrade
reboot

every 3 or 6 months. I do recall upgrading this build to debian stretch via CLI as well 2 years ago, at that time I had to change the distro name in the /etc/apt config files and I can’t recall what else. Not sure if that applies now or is there a better way / helper tool etc.
I’d rather avoid a fresh install as I run homeassistant (docker) and a bunch of home automation scripts in this same setup.

I’m also wondering if it would be better to wait until a 5.x kernel lands for Rpi3b, if that’s not too far away

If rebuilding from scratch is undesirable then pulling the SD and imaging it might be a good idea before you start. As per our wiki

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

That should automatically update your sources.list to Buster and bring you fully up to date. Before you do I would recommend searching the site for recent posts on Docker. There has been a couple threads with things that came up with the update so you might want to check to make sure there is not an open issue that will affect you. As for waiting for the next RPi kernel that would be hard to answer as it is not even in our testing builds yet afaik.

You need to run dist-upgrade twice, rebooting in between.

5.9 kernel is in staging for Pi

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Thanks for the pointer on this! I will be trying it in a couple of weeks.

RE 5.x, I thought 5.4 (and now 5.10 apparently) were going to be LTS releases.

Experience with 4.19 LTS on my use case in various systems has been amazingly rock solid, running for years, just rebooting for occasional patching. Looking forward to the same on 5.x

I took a leap of faith and ran dist-upgrade twice, it went super smooth (and super quick), no issues whatsoever! thanks Sam & team!

Docker just continued to work fine as before, containers continued to launch.

Question though, these are the docker versions I see installed:

apt list docker*
Listing... Done
docker-ce-cli/stretch,now 5:19.03.14~3-0~raspbian-stretch armhf [installed,automatic]
docker-ce/stretch,now 5:19.03.14~3-0~raspbian-stretch armhf [installed]
docker-compose/stable,now 1.21.0-3 all [installed]
docker-doc/stable,stable 18.09.1+dfsg1-7.1+deb10u2 all
docker-registry/stable 2.6.2~ds1-2+b21 armhf
docker.io/stable,stable 18.09.1+dfsg1-7.1+deb10u2 armhf
docker2aci/stable 0.17.2+dfsg-2+b10 armhf
docker/stable 1.5-2 all

The docker-ce version looks strange (stretch). If I try ‘apt install docker-ce’, apt claims that the latest version is already installed - i.e. it doesn’t grab the buster version.

is this expected?

p.s. found the problem. I had installed docker years ago and had added the official docker repo
/etc/apt/sources.list/docker.list
which had one entry pointing to stretch. I changed that to buster and on the next apt dist-upgrade the package got changed to buster’s version

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