The easiest way to manage installing, upgrading, and removing software is using APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) from Debian. To update software in Raspberry Pi OS, you can use the apt tool from a Terminal window.

rpi-update is a command line application that will update your Raspberry Pi OS kernel and VideoCore firmware to the latest pre-release versions.

The rpi-update script was originally written by Hexxeh, but is now supported by Raspberry Pi engineers. The script source is in the rpi-update repository.

To play an audio or video file in the Raspberry Pi OS desktop environment, you can simply double-click on the file in the file-manager, and VLC will automatically launch and play the file. Alternatively, you can launch "VLC Media Player" from the "Sound & Video" menu, and then select "Media" → "Open File…​" and navigate to the file you want to play. By default the audio is sent over the HDMI link; if you instead want to output the audio over the Headphone jack, right-click on the speaker-icon in the top-right corner of the screen, and select "AV Jack".

For more fine-grained control, you can also launch VLC from the command-line. For the examples below, we used a short clip from Big Buck Bunny.

To prevent the VLC GUI staying open after your file has finished playing, you can add the --play-and-exit flag:

You can also add the --fullscreen flag to force a video to use the full screen - and this can also lead to smoother playback in some circumstances.

If you use cvlc instead of vlc with any of these commands, then the VLC GUI won’t be shown:

If you have a raw H264 stream, for example as captured from the Raspberry Pi Camera Module, you will get much smoother playback in VLC by encapsulating the stream inside a container-format. This can be done using ffmpeg, for example this command converts video.h264 to a containerised video.mp4 at 30 fps:

ffmpeg -r 30 -i video.h264 -c:v copy video.mp4

Firstly, install the necessary VLC components:

And then download and play an example audio file:

To force the audio output to a particular device, you need to use:

replacing <alsa-device> with one of the following options:

Use the following command to get a list of all ALSA devices on your Raspberry Pi:

To force the video output to a particular device, you need to use:

replacing <drm-device> with one of the following options:

Use the following command to get a list of all DRM devices on your Raspberry Pi:

You can combine these options, so to direct the video output to the touchscreen, and the audio output to the headphone jack, you’d use

Enter the command fswebcam followed by a filename and a picture will be taken using the webcam, and saved to the filename specified:

This command will show the following information:

The webcam used in this example has a resolution of 1280 x 720 so to specify the resolution I want the image to be taken at, use the -r flag:

This command will show the following information:

Picture now taken at the full resolution of the webcam, with the banner present.

You can write a Bash script which takes a picture with the webcam. The script below saves the images in the /home/pi/webcam directory, so create the webcam subdirectory first with:

To create a script, open up your editor of choice and write the following example code:

This script will take a picture and name the file with a timestamp. Say we saved it as webcam.sh, we would first make the file executable:

Then run with:

Which would run the commands in the file and give the usual output:

You can use cron to schedule taking a picture at a given interval, such as every minute to capture a time-lapse.

First open the cron table for editing:

This will either ask which editor you would like to use, or open in your default editor. Once you have the file open in an editor, add the following line to schedule taking a picture every minute (referring to the Bash script from above):

Save and exit and you should see the message:

Ensure your script does not save each picture taken with the same filename. This will overwrite the picture each time.

The kmsprint tool can be used to list the display-modes supported by the monitors attached to the Raspberry Pi. Use kmsprint to see details of the monitors connected to the Raspberry Pi, and kmsprint -m to see a list of all the display-modes supported by each monitor. You can find source code for the kmsprint utility on Github.

The vcgencmd tool is used to output information from the VideoCore GPU on the Raspberry Pi. You can find source code for the vcgencmd utility on Github.

To get a list of all commands which vcgencmd supports, use vcgencmd commands. Some useful commands and their required parameters are listed below.

vclog is an application to display log messages from the VideoCore GPU from Linux running on the ARM. It needs to be run as root.

sudo vclog --msg prints out the message log, whilst sudo vclog --assert prints out the assertion log.

Visually-impaired users of Raspberry Pi OS can find helpful tools in the Recommend Software menu.

We offer the Orca screen reader to better navigate your way through the Raspberry Pi operating system, along with a screen magnifier to increase the readability of UI and screen elements.

Packages installed via apt are tested, are usually pre-compiled so they install faster, and are designed for Raspberry Pi OS. They won’t break your system. Installing via this route also means that all required dependencies are also installed, and a log of installation is maintained by the OS so installation can be easily rolled back (uninstalled) if needed.

For instance, to install the Python 3 library to support the Raspberry Pi Build HAT you would:

…​to install the pre-built library.

Using apt makes installing larger packages, like numpy (which has many native dependencies including a Fortran compiler), much simpler than installing individual packages using Python’s own package-management system.

If you want to install a Python library called "foobar" you can use apt search foobar to find the exact package name. In most cases, you’ll find that the required package is going to be called python-foobar or python3-foobar.

In previous versions of the operating system, it was possible to install libraries directly, system-wide, using the package installer for Python, commonly known as pip. You’ll find the following sort of command in many tutorials online.

In newer versions of Raspberry Pi OS, and other operating systems, this is disallowed. If you try and install a Python package system-wide you’ll receive an error similar to this:

This error is generated because you’re trying to install a third-party package into the system Python. A long-standing practical problem for Python users has been conflicts between OS package managers like apt and Python-specific package management tools like pip. These conflicts include both Python-level API incompatibilities and conflicts over file ownership.

Therefore from Bookworm onwards, packages installed via pip must be installed into a Python virtual environment using venv. A virtual environment is a container where you can safely install third-party modules so they won’t interfere with, or break, your system Python.

To use a virtual environment you will need to create a container to store the environment. There are several ways you can do this depending on how you want to work with Python.

Thonny is our recommended editor when you’re working with Python on the Raspberry Pi. By default Thonny uses the system Python. However, you can switch to using a Python virtual environment by clicking on the interpreter menu located at the bottom right of the Thonny window. Clicking on this will offer you a menu to select a configured interpreter or to Configure interpreter….

Selecting this will open a popup allowing you to create a new virtual environment.

Two 5V pins and two 3.3V pins are present on the board, as well as a number of ground pins (0V), which are unconfigurable. The remaining pins are all general purpose 3.3V pins, meaning outputs are set to 3.3V and inputs are 3.3V-tolerant.

A GPIO pin designated as an output pin can be set to high (3.3V) or low (0V).

A GPIO pin designated as an input pin can be read as high (3.3V) or low (0V). This is made easier with the use of internal pull-up or pull-down resistors. Pins GPIO2 and GPIO3 have fixed pull-up resistors, but for other pins this can be configured in software.

As well as simple input and output devices, the GPIO pins can be used with a variety of alternative functions, some are available on all pins, others on specific pins.

A handy reference can be accessed on the Raspberry Pi by opening a terminal window and running the command pinout. This tool is provided by the GPIO Zero Python library, which is installed by default in Raspberry Pi OS.

For more details on the advanced capabilities of the GPIO pins see gadgetoid’s interactive pinout diagram.

In order to use the GPIO ports your user must be a member of the gpio group. The pi user is a member by default, other users need to be added manually.

Using the GPIO Zero library makes it easy to get started with controlling GPIO devices with Python. The library is comprehensively documented at gpiozero.readthedocs.io.