Upgrading

Upgrades

Regolith 1.4.1 -> Regolith 1.6

If your system already has added the regolith-linux/release PPA, then upgrading is just matter of performing a regular upgrade:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

After performing the update, log back in to your system. However, if you have staged your own i3 config file or Xresources root, read the below section “Upgrading with Customizations”.

Regolith 1.0 - 1.2 -> Regolith 1.6

Due to the age between releases, it’s recommended to uninstall very old versions of Regolith and follow the general installation instructions to get Regolith 1.6.

Upgrading with Customizations

When updating from a major or minor version (eg 1.2 to 1.3), it is often the case that new Xresources values and other config files have been updated. Existing Xresources and config files such as the i3 config file will need to be updated in order for the upgrade to work properly. If you’ve customized any Regolith config files or created a stand-alone Xresources file (e.g. ~/.Xresources-regolith), these may need to be updated to take the upgraded files into account. A simple approach to doing this is to move them elsewhere, perform the upgrade, and then reintegrate any desired customizations into the new files:

$ mkdir ~/regolith-backup
$ mv ~/.Xresources-regolith ~/regolith-backup
$ mv ~/.config/regolith ~/regolith-backup

Once these steps are performed, logging back in should result in a “stock” instance of Regolith. From there, any changes desired to be reintegrated can be done by staging and then editing the new versions of the Regolith config files that exist in the /etc/regolith directory. Afterwards, it makes sense to apply your Xresources definitions one-by-one to make sure they’re still valid and working as intended.

Edits to /etc/regolith/... files

If you’ve taken shortcuts and manually edited files owned by root in /etc/regolith or elsewhere, the packaging tool may not update the files, nor mention that stale files have been left. Even removing the package via apt remove ... may not result in a clean system. In this case, use the purge command to remove the package and manually delete any left over files. For example, to clean up the i3 config file:

$ sudo apt purge regolith-i3-gaps-config
$ sudo rm -Rf /etc/regolith/i3 # be sure to backup any important changes
$ sudo apt install regolith-i3-gaps-config

Upgrading Ubuntu

The Ubuntu upgrade process automatically removes all PPAs from the system, including Regolith. The Regolith PPA must be re-added once the Ubuntu upgrade completes.

1. If the standard Ubuntu session is not installed, install it:

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-session

If you have it already installed this should cause no harm.

2. Perform the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version.
3. After rebooting, log into the stock Ubuntu session (not Regolith).
4. Add the Regolith PPA, as the installation process removed PPAs:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:regolith-linux/release

5. Upgrade Regolith to the latest version:

$ sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt install regolith-desktop-standard

6. Reboot, and now select the Regolith session at the login screen.

Note: Some users have reported that regolith-desktop is automatically uninstalled during the upgrade. If this happens, simply run sudo apt install --reinstall regolith-desktop-standard after the upgrade completes to restore the Regolith desktop session.