rpi-update is an excellent utility to get all the latest updates and patches for your Raspberry Pi Debian operating-system. But being a utility which downloads and installs all the latest, cutting-edge core OS components it can mess things at times. A recent bad core-patch made Raspberry Pi unbootable for many, after downloading all the files successfully the RPi will fail to boot with the red LED on and green LED flashing 3 times telling a problem with boot files.

The Raspberry Pi software can be divided into three core components - the closed-source GPU firmware, the modified ARM Linux Kernel (which controls how the CPU is utilized) and the software installed by the user. The GPU firmware and Kernel are regularly updated by the RasPi core team to fine-tune stability and performance of the little computer. Here is a simple utility to download and install these firmware and kernel updates in an automatic, user-friendly manner.