> Tribblix Upgrades

There are two paths to get newer versions of software in Tribblix, both using the zap utility. An update will install newer versions of packages or overlays, while an upgrade will install a newer version of Tribblix.

In general, updates affect the current system and can be applied with the system running. You'll have to restart any application you've updated. Whereas an upgrade creates a new boot environment, installs new packages to that, and you reboot to activate the upgraded system.

Before doing an upgrade, you must ensure that the system has the latest versions of the appropriate software. As root, issue:

zap refresh

followed by

zap update TRIBzap-upgrade

You will then be able to check whether an upgrade is available:

zap upgrade list

and you should be given a list similar to the following:

m30: (current)
m31: Milestone 31

which shows that you're currently running the m30 release, and that an upgrade to m31 (Milestone 31) is available.

To perform the upgrade:

zap upgrade m31

and then to boot into the newly upgraded system, use beadm to activate it and then reboot - the appropriate commands will be printed at the end of the upgrade process, but will be something like

beadm activate m31
init 6

If the newly upgraded system fails to work properly, then you can roll back to the previous version. If you're in a running system then you can use beadm list to see the available boot environments

BE       Active Mountpoint      Space Policy Created
m30      -      -               28.0M static 2023-05-03 15:40
m31      NR     /               12.2G static 2023-07-10 18:42

(note that the initially installed boot environment will usually be called tribblix), and then

beadm activate m30
init 6

to go back to the older boot environment.

If the new boot environment won't boot properly, simply select the old one from the boot menu, and then beadm activate it so it will be the default next time.

If you have the ISO for the new release, then you might save some time and bandwidth by copying the zap files from the pkgs directory on the ISO into the /var/zap/cache directory. And if you're upgrading more than one system, copying /var/zap/cache will do even better.

Once you're happy that the new version of Tribblix is working well, you can remove older versions with the beadm destroy command.