So we’ve already seen that our Raspberry Pi has quite a few software packages already on it and to keep these software packages up to date we’re going to be using a tool called APT.  So between the last video and this one I’ve connected to a WiFi network just in case we needed to download a few updates and we’re going to run the Terminal. From the Terminal - this is how we access the APT tool.

The Raspbian operating system that we are using keeps a list of software packages that are available  and before we download any softwares its always a good idea to update this list incase the software packages have been updated. So we’re going to execute the command sudo (and I’ll come back to what that means later) apt is the tool we’re using, api-get and we’re going to run update. So this is the process of the Raspberry Pi is now connecting to various software repositories and just gathering information about software packages, like what version they’re up to. This usually takes a little while especially if you haven’t done it in a while.

Ok, as we can see that has finished fetching the software index updates so now if we wish we could run the update command which will compare the versions of software that are currently installed to the ones that are in this list and if there are any new versions that are in the list it will automatically update them. We do this with the sudo apt-get upgrade command. Now we’re prompted to accept if we do want to either free or use the space on the memory card, that this action will cause. So I’m going to strike ‘Y’ for yes and while that is ticking away let’s have a discussion about that sudo command that I mentioned before.

Sudo stands for ‘super user do’ and it’s a way for users in this operating system to temporarily elevate  their security privileges to do things like perform software upgrades. Because you are elevating your security privileges albeit temporarily it’s always worth double checking your typing when you are using the sudo command just you’ve  made a typo that could break your system essentially. Using tools like apt-get is usually pretty safe but further down the track it’s easy to become complacent when you’re using sudo commands and it’s just worth remembering that when you’re using sudo the Raspberry Pi is just going to pull out all stops and do exactly what you tell it to. Ok. so it seems those upgrades have completed successfully so we now have a fully up to date Raspberry Pi.

In a previous video I mentioned that if your desktop looks a little different to mine and we’ll come back to that later, well we’re going to turn that now. If you bought an SD card that came preloaded with NOOBS you may be running a version of Raspian thats a few months old and in the last couple of months a major upgrade was released called Pixel which is largely a cosmetic upgrade but it does have a few features.  So if you wish to upgrade from the older Raspbian to this new version with Pixel you can run the sudo apt-get dist-upgrade command and that will upgrade your distribution of Raspbian, its like upgrading to the newest version of Raspbian rather than just the software packages that are inside it. We will include some material for that in the supplementary section beside the video.

So that wraps things up for chapter one, at this point we have our Raspberry Pi and we know how to use it as a desktop computer and you can continue to do that if you want. If you’re interested to learn how to program on your Pi then I’ll see you in chapter 2 :-)