So, I’ve had a Raspberry Pi 4 sitting brand new in a box for a few years, and decided to install BirdNetPi on it yesterday.
It’s working like a champ, but because BirdNetPi needed a legacy version of Raspian, it’s got old software on it.
Is there any way to update the software (i.e. RealVNC) without updating the OS? There is no built-in software updater, and I seem to very easily break Linux every time I make an attempt to use it. LOL
I don’t know why your software or OS can not be updated.
According to the official instructions (https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi/wiki/Installation-Guide) is should just be a normal raspbian. Nothing on there says it needs a legacy version, but I may be overlooking something.
If you installed it some other way or did it long ago then maybe do the setup over again from scratch with the newest raspbian version? (Don’t forget to backup any data you’d want to keep)
It took several attempts (with failures) to get it installed on the latest Raspian version, then after some digging I saw that the requirements said to use “An SD Card with the 64-bit version of RaspiOS installed (please use Bullseye)”.
With Bullseye installed, BirdNetPi works just fine, but it is old and comes with old software.
Ah makes sense. Still there should be no issue with doing stuff the normal way.
apt updatedoesn’t update your OS to a whole new version.The command for an OS update is something like “do-release-upgrade” (but I forgot the exact name since I havent used debian for years)
Only on Ubuntu based distros AFAIK but
sudo do-release-upgradeis the correct commandCreate a backup image from the working SD card. Write that backup image to a spare SD card and verify it works. Then try to do ‘apt update’ and see if anything breaks. If it breaks you got a spare SD card ready to go :)