Fedora Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update or rebase to Fedora Linux 39 on your Fedora Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert things if something unforeseen happens.
Update your existing system
Prior to actually doing the rebase to Fedora Linux 39, you should apply any pending updates. Enter the following in the terminal:
$ rpm-ostree update
or install updates through GNOME Software and reboot.
Rebasing using GNOME Software
GNOME Software shows you that there is new version of Fedora Linux available on the Updates screen.
First thing you need to do is download the new image, so click on the Download button. This will take some time. When it’s done you will see that the update is ready to install.
Click on the Restart & Upgrade button. This step will take only a few moments and the computer will be restarted when the update is completed. After the restart you will end up in new and shiny release of Fedora Linux 39. Easy, isn’t it?
Rebasing using terminal
If you prefer to do everything in a terminal, then this part of the guide is for you.
Rebasing to Fedora Linux 39 using the terminal is easy. First, check if the 39 branch is available:
$ ostree remote refs fedora
You should see the following in the output:
fedora:fedora/39/x86_64/silverblue
If you want to pin the current deployment (meaning that this deployment will stay as an option in GRUB until you remove it), you can do it by running:
# 0 is entry position in rpm-ostree status $ sudo ostree admin pin 0
To remove the pinned deployment use the following command:
# 2 is entry position in rpm-ostree status $ sudo ostree admin pin --unpin 2
Next, rebase your system to the Fedora Linux 39 branch.
$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/39/x86_64/silverblue
Finally, the last thing to do is restart your computer and boot to Fedora Linux 39.
How to roll back
If anything bad happens (for instance, if you can’t boot to Fedora Linux 39 at all) it’s easy to go back. At boot time, pick the entry in the GRUB menu for the version prior to Fedora Linux 39 and your system will start in that previous version rather than Fedora Linux 39. If you don’t see the GRUB menu, try to press ESC during boot. To make the change to the previous version permanent, use the following command:
$ rpm-ostree rollback
That’s it. Now you know how to rebase Fedora Silverblue to Fedora Linux 39 and roll back. So why not do it today?
FAQ
Because there are similar questions in comments for each article about rebasing to newer version of Silverblue I will try to answer them in this section.
Question: Can I skip versions during rebase of Fedora? For example from Fedora 37 Silverblue to Fedora 39 Silverblue?
Answer: Although it could be sometimes possible to skip versions during rebase, it is not recommended. You should always update to one version above (38->39 for example) to avoid unnecessary errors.
Question: I have rpm-fusion layered and I got errors during rebase. How should I do the rebase?
Answer: If you have rpm-fusion layered on your Silverblue installation, you should do the following before rebase (this is a single line command, beware the wrapping):
rpm-ostree update --uninstall rpmfusion-free-release --uninstall rpmfusion-nonfree-release --install rpmfusion-free-release --install rpmfusion-nonfree-release
After doing this you can follow the guide in this blog post.
Question: Could this guide be used for another ostree editions (Kinoite, Sericea)?
Yes, you can follow the Rebasing using the terminal part of this guide for every ostree edition of Fedora. Just use the corresponding branch. For example for Kinoite use
Steven
It was an easy upgrade in GNOME Software. Thanks to all!
Lennart Jern
Nice, easy upgrade, as usual!
One weird thing though: my terminal is now light/white colored even though I use dark theme everywhere. Anyone else having this issue?
SuperTux
Is it possible to rebase to kinoite or other variations when using silverblue ?
TopDAW
Thank you very much! The update did not show up in GNOME software so I rebased manually. This did not initially work until I saw your tip about rpm-fusion.
All good now – brilliant!
Brant
Hi SuperTux,
You can actually, I didn’t have any issues upon testing Silverblue -> Kinoite but upon rolling back Gnome’s default file icons seem bugged (.config file errors). So I can’t say how reliable going back and forth would be natively. Also you’ll likely have leftover desktop environment files in your .config so you may need to look for them and delete them. This will also likely fix any bugs between switching back and forth.
Good luck and enjoy. Can always test on Gnome Boxes too!
Grandpa Leslie Satenstein
I have 3 other partitions, including 2 other backup partitions.
How do I get these into a clean silver-blue installation?
Ashberian
Using Silverblue-Kinoite and just upgraded to v39.
Run into some issues upgrading through Discover, had to remove rpmfusion-free &non-free repos before upgrading, for that i used the single line uninstall/install command from this article however it didn’t work… until i just used two single line commands to uninstall both repos, one after another. Then i finally proceeded to update/rebase without noticeable issues.
Now on Kinoite 39 trying to reinstall both repos, however it always show the same error:
“error: Packages not found: rpmfusion-free-release, rpmfusion-nonfree-release”
Norman
Thank you Michal Konečný for writing your article “How to rebase to Fedora Linux 39 on Silverblue”.