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How To: Update OpenSUSE Tumbleweed From The Terminal

It’s time for an article that describes how to update openSUSE from the terminal. After all, I’ve done so for Ubuntu and Fedora. I might as well do one for openSUSE. It seems like a good thing to do.

While most of this site is aimed at bringing you up to speed, making Linux easier, it’s also biased towards desktop Linux users. Well, today’s distro isn’t really all that popular in the desktop sphere, it’s more a server distro. There is a desktop version, and it’s a pretty great distroy.

So, to avoid confusion, “SLES” stands for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It is a paid product with an excellent pedigree and a great reputation in the community. openSUSE is the community edition of that software. openSUSE is mostly used on the desktop, as a workstation distro.

Over the years, I’ve tried openSUSE here and there and found it to be functional, stable, and easy enough to figure out. There’s a lovely rolling-release version of openSUSE that’s called ‘Tumbleweed’. If you have a hankering to try openSUSE, go for it and give Tumbleweed a shot!

A shout-out to a Linux.org user: Gecko Linux is based on openSUSE.

Oddly, it’s often harder to write the intro than it is to write the meat of the article. It can even take more time to write the intro than it takes to write the rest of the article. This article is likely to be one of those.

Ah well… On to the article!

Update openSUSE From The Terminal:

You’ll need an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

First, you need to refresh the database of what software you have vs what software is available. Obviously this means comparing version numbers. This is a necessary step, otherwise it’d be updating blindly and that’d make no sense! So, the command you’re looking for is:

sudo zypper refresh

1	sudo zypper refresh

That will run its course and take some time. On a rolling release, you can expect quite a lot of updates to be available. When it is finished, and you’re ready to do the updates, you can just enter:

sudo zypper update

1	sudo zypper update

That’s actually all there is to it, at the base level. There’s still more, as there always is. There’s always more! If you have run the refresh command and want to see what upgrades are available, you can do that with this command:

sudo zypper list-updates

1	sudo zypper list-updates

But, that’s about all you’re going to need to know. Like always, check the man page. It’s not terribly difficult to update openSUSE, anyhow. It’s straight forward in both the terminal and GUI. My personal preference is to use the terminal.

Closure:

Woohoo! There you have it! Here’s another article and this one is showing you how to update openSUSE in the terminal. It’s not terribly difficult, but it’s worth knowing. Not too many people use openSUSE and even the best of us might be unfamiliar and need a hint.

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Upgrade Ubuntu From The Terminal

Today’s article will show how to update and upgrade Ubuntu from the terminal. Of course, this will work on any system that uses apt, including Debian, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, etc… You can always upgrade when the GUI tells you to, but you can do it manually on your own time.

Once in a while, I come across someone who refuses to upgrade. This is a bad idea. Upgrades include things like security upgrades and they’re pretty much mandatory. It’s Linux, so you don’t “have to”, but it makes you a bad netizen because those security upgrades may very well mean your computer is being used as a spam relay or, worse, a part of a botnet.

So, please, upgrade your Ubuntu systems – and, really, all Linux boxes should get regular upgrades. I can’t emphasize this enough! Upgrade your system – if not for you then for the rest of us who have to deal with enough internet hostility. Malware exists for Linux, as does exploits for Linux and the software you have installed. Even if you don’t care about your own experiences, care about the rest of the people on the ‘net. Thanks!

For this article, we’ll be using apt. Apt is apt-get in disguise, but not quite the same. If you’re scripting you use apt-get, because it’s more stable. When you’re running commands yourself, use apt because it’s faster/easier.

This article should be pretty quick and easy.

Upgrade Ubuntu From The Terminal:

Obviously, this article requires an open terminal. You can open one with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you have your terminal open, we’ll go ahead and update the database (the cache) to see if any upgrades are available. To do that, you run:

sudo apt update

1	sudo apt update

It’ll tell you if upgrades are available and give you some more information – such as telling you how to see which application upgrades are available. In this case, we’re just going to upgrade everything. Like so:

sudo apt upgrade

1	sudo apt upgrade

That is sometimes interactive. It will want you to agree manually to the upgrades. You can just skip all that by adding a -y flag. Even better, you can now string both commands together and save some time monitoring the terminal. That command, and I use this pretty much exclusively by way of alias, is:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

The && means that the next command will only run if the first has been completed successfully. You can even add autoremove to this string of commands and keep things a little cleaner automatically.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -y

The autoremove will “remove packages that were automatically
installed to satisfy dependencies for other packages and are now no
longer needed as dependencies changed or the package(s) needing
them were removed in the meantime.” You might as well include it, as it’s pretty harmless and will save you some disk space.

Finally, there’s full-upgrade which is quite similar to the old apt-get dist-upgrade, in that it will upgrade you to a new release if both a new release is available and your settings are to upgrade to new releases (instead of staying on a LTS branch, for example). You’ll find that full-upgrade is also capable of deleting unneeded files all on its own.

To use full-upgrade, you’d still run the update first and then run the command. You can also pack them together, like so:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

And there you have it. That’s about all you really need to know about upgrading Ubuntu from the terminal. It’s not hard, so just do it. Yeah, once in a blue moon it breaks something. That’s usually easily fixed and the risk is worth the benefits – to you and the rest of the internet.

Closure:

I can’t emphasize it enough – do your upgrades regularly. Now you know how to upgrade Ubuntu from the terminal, which is something I naturally do out of habit. I actually have it aliased to the ‘update’ command and it takes care of all that for me. I can’t remember the last time it broke anything – but it has to have been multiple years ago. Breakage isn’t a real risk, as things are usually heavily tested.

How To: Update Ubuntu From The Terminal

It’s possible, even easy, to update Ubuntu from the terminal. Personally, I almost always update from the terminal, regardless of distro. This article will tell you how to update Ubuntu from the terminal – but it’s equally valid for Debian, official Ubuntu flavors like Lubuntu or Kubuntu, and it’s also valid for distros based on Ubuntu or Debian – such as Mint.

I recently did an article about updating Fedora from the terminal. Boy howdy, I hope that link works! It’s scheduled for publication so it doesn’t show me the real URL that it’ll have when it has been published! So, I hope I typed it properly! Either way, I recently did said article and figured I might as well do one for Ubuntu.

The tool we’ll be using is known as ‘APT‘ and apt has been a staple of Linux since Debian introduced it in the late nineties. It’s known as “Advanced Package Tool” and is used to configure and install applications. Even if you’re doing it graphically, it’s usually apt under the hood when you’re using Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc…

There really isn’t a whole lot to this, so it should be a reasonably short article. It’s also an article that may make the terminal more approachable for people who are new to Linux. Once you see how easy it is, you might decide to try it yourself! If it goes well, you might learn more about the terminal and the many ways you can use it. We can find out!

Update Ubuntu From The Terminal:

This article requires an open terminal, like oh so many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should pop open.

Once you have your terminal open, you’re going to update your database of available software and the version numbers of said software. This database will be checked against the database of software (and versions) that you have already installed. It’s just a simple command:

sudo apt update

1	sudo apt update

That’ll let you know if there’s any software that needs to be updated and may take a few seconds to complete. If any software is available it will let you know and you can upgrade to the newest version. The notification will look something like:

3 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

1	3 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

You can, as stated, see which applications need to be upgraded to new versions by running that command. This upgrade process may also add or remove system software as needed. But, to upgrade, it’s just as easy:

sudo apt upgrade

1	sudo apt upgrade

This will spit out a list of software that will be updated, will be added, or should be removed – and you can enter “Y” to agree to the upgrades before pressing ENTER to continue. That’s it, you’re done.

However, I like to alias (an article still not written should link here) all this to a single command. My actual command looks like this:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove

That will update the database and make sure it completes successfully. It will then upgrade the software, effectively entering the Y for you. Finally, it will automatically remove software that’s no longer needed. Some folks might consider that command a bit risky to run automatically, but I’ve been doing it for years. Use it at your own risk!

Closure:

That’s it, actually. There’s really not that much more I can tell you about how to update Ubuntu from the terminal. Sure, there are other apt commands, but those aren’t really important for this article. Unlike the Fedora article, there’s no handy way to undo an upgrade with apt.