Hello Armbian-Folks,

 

more than two years ago I purchased a CubieTruck and installed Cubian with kernel 3.4.79 on the microSD. The system is running since then and serving as airprint server, boinc client and monitoring device for my internet connection. Basically I use it more or less as a headless server.

 

Now I would like to have this system more future ready and looking for an upgrade path. The kernel is quite old and the distro is based still on debian wheezy. Also Cubian is dead and not maintained anymore.

 

Are you able to help or provide some good starting tipps to upgrade my system to new kernel and maybe armbian (debian jessy) as distro?

 

I was searching the web for the last 2 days to find a suitable howto but couldn't find something usable.

 

It would be awesome if I can find some help here where to start.

Many Thanks in advance.

 

Sorry, we can't support in-place upgrade from any other releases (and even dist-upgrades from much older Armbian releases is not recommended). Just install a clean Armbian image and try to transfer your configuration to the new system.

Sorry, we can't support in-place upgrade from any other releases (and even dist-upgrades from much older Armbian releases is not recommended). Just install a clean Armbian image and try to transfer your configuration to the new system.

 

Not the answer I hoped for but maybe the only way to go . Is there a way to save the current running system into a virtual machine with virtual box before doing a clean install?

 

Do you aim with armbian that this won't happen in two years again? 

Not the answer I hoped for but maybe the only way to go . Is there a way to save the current running system into a virtual machine with virtual box before doing a clean install?

You can save the file system contents for offline access, but it's not possible to fully emulate this hardware.

 

Do you aim with armbian that this won't happen in two years again? 

Armbian -> Armbian dist-upgrade should work fine for new images, but it's always recommended to start from scratch to include new tweaks and configuration templates.

Is there a way to save the current running system into a virtual machine with virtual box before doing a clean install?

 

You should do yourself a favour and get a new SD card showing high random IO performance (I would still recommend Samsung EVO or EVO+): https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/954-sd-card-performance/

 

Then you start with a fresh Armbian install from scratch and can then migrate settings/stuff from your old installation (maybe an USB card reader needed too) while also being able to boot your old installation to check certain things.

Understood. I've also tried to find a way with pre-installing an armbian in VirtualBox, which led to suggestion of QEMU. But this is way to complicated for me. I might go with a fresh SDCard and try to find out what I've done already on the old installation and then migrate. 

 

Thanks. Topic can be closed.