How to update and upgrade your Pi-Star based hotspot

There are a couple of methods of updating a Pi-Star based MMDVM hotspot, one upgrades Pi-Star itself and the other method does a full operating system update as well as Pi-Star.
The Pi itself automatically runs a process overnight that updates the host file and various other things but this is how to do a full update and upgrade.

Both methods are easy enough to do but the full upgrade needs a little more work.

To do a Pi-Star update and upgrade without updating the Raspberry Pi operating system, click Configuration in the main title bar at the top.

Then click Expert.

Then click Update.

This will only take a minute or so to run and will end up like this.

If you get a message at the bottom saying ‘mount point is busy’, that’s fine and nothing to worry about.

Now repeat the process, click Configuration and then Expert but this time you need to select Upgrade.

This is what you’ll get – Note that in this case, I’m already running the most recent version of Pi-Star so there is nothing to do. If there was an upgrade available, it would say that it’s complete after just a few seconds.

Again, if you get a message at the bottom saying ‘mount point is busy’, that’s fine and nothing to worry about.

To finish off, click Configuration again and then click on Power.

Click the big Reboot button on the left.

Depending on the speed of your Raspberry Pi, this may take a couple of minutes to reboot.

If you want to do a full update and upgrade of the Raspberry Pi operating system, the process is a little more involved but still relatively straightforward.

Click Configuration in the main title bar at the top.

Then click Expert.

Now click SSH Access.

You’ll get a box similar to this appear.

Enter the login name which is pi-star and press enter, then enter the password which will be raspberry unless you’ve changed it.

You’ll get a screen like this.

At the prompt, type sudo pistar-update and press enter.

The Pi will start to update and you’ll get a lot of text scrolling on the display. Depending on your Raspberry Pi, this may take a while. If it appears to hang, be patient and just let it finish as it’s updating Raspbian which is the main operating system on the Pi.

When it finishes, the bottom of the screen will look like this.

As you can see, I’ve got the ‘mount point is busy’ message I mentioned earlier which is nothing to worry about.

At the prompt, type sudo pistar-upgrade and press enter.

Again, this instance of Pi-Star is up to date – If there was an update to install, it would only take a few seconds.

Finally, go through the reboot process as described above.

Please note that if you are using Pi-Star V3.4.17, this process will not upgrade it to V4, the only way to do that is to write a new SD card.