How to rebase to Fedora Linux 42 on Silverblue

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 rebase to Fedora Linux 42 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 42, you should apply any pending updates. Enter the following in the terminal:

$ rpm-ostree update

or install updates through GNOME Software and reboot.

Note

rpm-ostree is the underlying atomic technology that all the Fedora Atomic Desktops use. The techniques described here for Silverblue will apply to all of them with proper modifications for the appropriate desktop.

Rebasing using GNOME Software

GNOME Software shows you that there is new version of Fedora Linux available on the Updates screen.

First thing to do is download the new image, so select the Download button. This will take some time. When it is done you will see that the update is ready to install.

Select the Restart & Upgrade button. This step will take only a few moments and the computer will restart when the update is completed. After the restart you will end up in a new and shiny release of Fedora Linux 42. 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 42 using the terminal is easy. First, check if the 42 branch is available:

$ ostree remote refs fedora

You should see the following in the output:

fedora:fedora/42/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 this by running this command:

# 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 42 branch.

$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/42/x86_64/silverblue

Finally, the last thing to do is restart your computer and boot to Fedora Linux 42.

How to roll back

If anything bad happens (for instance, if you can’t boot to Fedora Linux 42 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 42 and your system will start in that previous version rather than Fedora Linux 42. 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 42 and roll back. So why not do it today?

Known Issues

• systemd-remount-fs.service fails to start (root mount options from /etc/fstab are not taken into account anymore with composefs): https://gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/sig/-/issues/72

FAQ

Because there are similar questions in comments for each blog 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 39 Silverblue to Fedora 42 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 (39->40->41->42 for example) to avoid unnecessary errors.

Question: I have rpm-fusion layered and I get 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:

$ 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 other ostree editions (Fedora Atomic Desktops) as well like Kinoite, Sericea (Sway Atomic), Onyx (Budgie Atomic),…?

Yes, you can follow the Rebasing using the terminal part of this guide for every Fedora Atomic Desktop. Just use the corresponding branch. For example, for Kinoite use fedora:fedora/42/x86_64/kinoite