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I have Raspbian Jessie and recently I did sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and after that update, my Raspberry Pi camera stopped functioning. How do I downgrade Raspbian in order to get my camera working again? My camera is the Raspicam available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

EDIT: The dist-upgrade was done from Jessie.

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  • When you ran the dist-upgrade, was the pi running Wheezy or Jessie? – Jacobm001♦ Feb 13 '16 at 5:28
  • It was running Jessie, I'll update it. – Human Feb 13 '16 at 5:31
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    If you can't figure out a way to downgrade, you could always backup your home directory, and then reinstall your OS, that way you would only lose some files, and not everything... – Patrick Cook Feb 13 '16 at 8:38
  • just reinstall the system, you can't downgrade easy way... apt-get has it's logs, so you can manually revert changes, but it's a hell of the work, did that once on Debian... really... better just format it and reinstall – Flash Thunder Feb 13 '16 at 9:52
  • I just decided to download the required files to my pc, and then just installed a backed up version of my OS from 1.5 months back. – Human Feb 15 '16 at 6:02
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If it is a very recent upgrade then try the interactive (default) mode of aptitude run with sudo; that has a TUI (text a.k.a. console user interface, done using ncurses if anyone is interested) package manager that can display all the versions currently available/installed of each package.

If you can identify which package is the problem and you can obtain an older version (as a .deb) file you can plonk it as root into /var/cache/apt/archives/ and that application will allow you to change the version installed manually.

This is assuming other dependencies aren't an issue (the bottom area of the application turns from normal blue to red if the current combination of things is problematic) and other lines of listing. The UI may take a bit of time to get used to but for starters I will tell you that <cntl>-t activates the menu bar and q for quit will escape out of things; the current "line" is highlighted in reverse and any line begging with --- can be selected with <enter> to be expanded (when it changes to --\).

Hope this helps you to put your system back together..., here is a couple of screen-shots of aptitude in use showing a package that I HAVEN'T installed "solaar-gnome" (non of the four versions listed on the bottom of the second picture is installed - there is just a leading p indicating a package version is available) on the machine concerned (my Debian PC) as it would need a gnome package "gnome-shell" which I haven't got installed (the red line)!

Picture of front page of aptitude in use

Picture of aptitude displaying details of a package

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  • This is great, however, it is not a package issue, the problem is that I need to rollback to an earlier version of Raspbian. – Human Feb 15 '16 at 6:07
  • However you said you were already on Jessie - so sudo apt-get dist-upgrade will not have done a dist-upgrade - it only will have done an upgrade which means you may be able to down version an odd package or few! – SlySven Feb 16 '16 at 0:08

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