Difference between revisions of "Upgrading"

Latest revision as of 14:48, 15 July 2021

Development strategy

The current development strategy consists of 2 different versions:

1. Development. (Nightly Build) Images created from the latest development codebase. These are for developers only, unstable, and may break at any point. These versions are not released to the public. At current the strategy has changed and develop is released to the public, but remember these are not thoroughly tested and can break down at any moment.
2. Release candidate. These are precursors to a stable release, used for final public testing before creating a stable release. Only use if you want to test and report back issues to the forum. At current (OpenPLi > 8.0) develop/Nightly Build is released for anyone to test and as such there are no more release candidates.
3. Stable release. This version is deemed suitable for every day use, even if you are a novice or not technically savvy.

How and what on upgrades

OpenPLi distinguishes between minor releases and major releases. A minor release is when you upgrade from version 7.1 to 7.2 and a major release is when you upgrade from version 7.X to version 8.X. When you want to upgrade, minor and major releases must be approached differently:

Minor releases (so like 7.0 => 7.2) are updates, so updating will suffice! So Main menu > Setup > Software update

Major releases (so like 7 => 8) you must flash, preferably using the menu and choosing the backup option, then everything is restored after the flash. When there is no Hard disk present use an USB stick.

The reason why you have to flash when there is a major release is because such a step (7.x to 8.x) is always accompanied by a new OpenEmbedded (OE) version (eg. a new operating system version). If you want to read more about OE go to Yocto project

Release notes

When a release comes online, details of what has changed will be in the release notes. At current, the strategy is that before a release there is a pre-release or release candidate (RC). As a pre-release of release candidate is not "the release", there are no details on what has changed as the release notes will only come online with the release.

What can you expect from upgrading

Of course we opt for more stability, look and feel changes, new or improved plugins, more and better translations, etc and when vendors have updated drivers, they will be present.

Drivers

Generally there will be only driver updates, when a new minor or major version is released, this is because drivers come from the vendor and we want them tested thoroughly before implementing them.

Backup

As always before you upgrade create a Backup, although we test everything thorough, it's always best to do so.