We’ve been playing around with DeepLens again lately. They’ve been sitting on the bench for some time so the software was pretty badly out of date and as this still isn’t really a mainstream device yet, the old software didn’t work and the auto-upgrade from the AWS console didn’t work.

I’d highly recommend just SSHing (I do hope you kept that SSH password when you set it up!) into the deeplens and manually upgrading. Deeplens is running a modified ubuntu so this is just simply

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

However you might hit this common gotcha, and the error message is somewhat criptic

dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_9.4ubuntu4.6_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite '/etc/lsb-release', which is also in package config 1.0-1
Processing triggers for plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text (0.9.2-3ubuntu13.1) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.122ubuntu8.8) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.13.0-1007-deeplens
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_01.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/kbl_huc_ver02_00_1810.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/bxt_huc_ver01_07_1398.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/skl_huc_ver01_07_1398.bin for module i915
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_9.4ubuntu4.6_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

You’ll have to force the install of the package using:

sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_9.4ubuntu4.6_amd64.deb

Then carry on with apt-upgrade, reboot (sudo reboot), and you should be back in business and video streaming on the console should also work. Bear in mind on the AWS console - it will always say you need an update…. just ignore this and stick with command line is my advice.