NOOBS v1.3.3 available

If you got a Raspberry Pi for Christmas, check out this post for some suggestions on how to get started.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the NOOBS minor revision number on the downloads page crept up by one at the end of the day on Christmas Eve. This release incorporates updated versions of Arch, Raspbian and Raspbmc.

Check out the release notes for each distribution for more details. Highlights for Raspbian include:

  • New firmware and 3.10 kernel, with numerous functionality improvements.
  • New hardware-accelerated X driver included and enabled by default.
  • Mathematica and the Wolfram Language installed by default.
  • Updated Scratch image.
  • PyPy 2.2, with incremental garbage collection.
  • Our new V4L2 camera driver, and an updated v4l-utils package.

Thanks to Dom Cobley (for firmware and kernel), Maciej Fijalkowski and Armin Rigo (for PyPy), Tim Rowledge (for Scratch), Vincent Sanders, Luke Diamand, David Stevenson, Tim Gover and Simon Mellor (for V4L2), Alex Newman and the Wolfram Research team (for Mathematica), Siarhei Siamashka and the fbturbo team (for X), Dave Higham (for Arch), Alex Bradbury and Peter Green (for Raspbian) and Sam Nazarko (for Raspbmc).

This release was coordinated by Andrew Scheller, who will be handling NOOBS releasing from now on.

If you have any problems with NOOBS by all means ask here, we’ll try to help, but it’s probably better to head over to the forums.

68 comments

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Great news, but does it also includes a newer RISC OS image?

eben

No. We’re expecting a new RISC OS image imminently, and will kick out NOOBS 1.3.4 when it arrives.

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Note that some programs, e.g. servoblaster, will have problems with the 3.10 kernel and accelerated X (fbturbo). Fbturbo uses DMA channel 0 which conflicts with servoblaster also using DMA channel 0. A newer version of servoblaster using a DMA channel you can choose should be available soon.

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Exactly how fast is Raspbian with a new accelerated X compared to older versions? Has this accelerated X anything to do Wayland/Weston?

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Nothing to do with Wayland/Weston. See http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=45746 and https://github.com/ssvb/xf86-video-fbturbo for a bit of background. DMA is used for large blit operations which can help a lot for performance. I find the boost very noticeable – you’d see large measurable improvements with things like x11perf or gtkperf, but it’s not really worth reporting those figures as they’re really microbenchmarks.

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For those with systems already running will apt-update / upgrade take us to the same place as 1.3.3 ?

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apt-get update and apt-get upgrade will get you to the newest kernel/firmware version. You’ll additionally want to apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-fbturbo to get the improved X.Org performance.

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Do the V4L drivers now allow the MMAL camera to work with the standard Motion release?

Same question as above in respect of existing users: with apt-get upgrade give us the same features?

Why can’t I use my Forum profile on this comments page? :)

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The forum thread on the official V4L2 driver has some more info.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=62364

I can confirm the beta V4L2 driver did enable stock “motion” to work (no config at all). That is with YU12 format. http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=62364#p463001
A recent v4l2 update (Dec. 23) intended to enable MJPEG output may have broken something, though.

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I’d love to see you add the RPITC,,, the thin client with citrix and iceweasal….

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For the Mythic Beasties: not sure why, but I kept getting 404s when clicking on the Comments links for this post on the http://www.raspberrypi.org page using latest Firefox on Windoze 7. A page reload or opening of the link in another tab got me here, but just in case anyone there is tracking this sort of thing …

What a great holiday present – hardware-accelerated X, PyPy 2.2, updated Scratch, Mathematica installed. It’s like Santa actually got my wish list and ignored all of my coal-in-the-stocking-deserving behavio(u)r over the past year! :{D}

liz

Just fixed – we were putting in some multilanguage support and it made the database unhappy. Back to normal now. (Thanks Ben!)

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Does that mean that this site will have multilanguage support soon?
If the answer is yes, then I’d like apply as a Hungarian translator. :)

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Mmm polyglot.

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Thanks for the offer. We’re intending to trial other languages soon, but unsure of the long-term plan as yet.

Please drop me a line at ben [at] raspberrypi.org so I remember your offer :)

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Will I get the kernel updates for an existing raspbian installation.

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Only shows new pypy packages…

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Did you already upgrade the kernel/firmware recently? The latest is 20131219. You can verify what you have installed with `dpkg -l | grep raspberrypi-bootloader`

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Also see post #4.

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I have just noticed that with the new NOOBS (v1.3.3), you will need a larger than 4GB card to do a clean install of the RASPBIAN OS.
Have just tried on a freshly formatted 4GB card and get the following when RASPBIAN is selected:
Needed: 2352 MB
Available: 2349 MB
Anyway this can be trimmed down for those who have just been given Pi’s and 4GB cards (as recommended as the minimum size card) for Christmas ?

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Hmm, that is a pain and something we should obviously add to our testing procedures. Now that the Raspbian image contains some larger packages pre-installed, fitting it on a 4GiB card as well as NOOBS (including an untouched compressed image) is pushing it a bit. I’ll have a think.

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If you only need to save (2352 – 2349) = 3 MB that seems doable. Are you still including this file in raspbian by default? /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/hello_video/test.h264
because it’s a 31 MB video (start of “big buck bunny”) that could probably be trimmed. Or removed.

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There’s also about 300 MBytes in icons that seems a bit overkill!

Gordon

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It’s not necessarily “only 3MB” that needs to be saved, as different “4GB SD cards” actually have different capacities – for example on one of my 4GB cards it says Needed: 2352 MB
Available: 2308 MB

As a temporary workaround you could try deleting one of the OS subfolders (that you know that you’re not going to be installing)in the ‘os’ folder on your NOOBS card, before booting NOOBS in your Pi for the first time. This will make the recovery partition take up less space, leaving more free space for Raspbian to install into.

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Yes I have just done this (removed ALL folders from the os folder except /Raspbian and /data_partition) as I don’t use any of the other OS’s and now will install fine.
I hope the Pi newcomers see this temporary fix and are able to use their new Pi’s :)

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I ran into this issue and tracked it down to my 4GB SD card not actually being a 4GB card – it was closer to 3.9 GB (and 3.6 GiB.) This seems to be a clear case of the hardware not meeting the minimum requirements.

However, I’d have to suggest that it was perhaps a bit unwise to update NOOBS the day before the largest gifting holiday in the English-speaking world.

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I recommend fixing this as a matter of urgency – the number of people who have just got 4GB cards to cope with the previous install size must be substantial…

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Looks like my 11yo and I are running into the space issue with NOOBS 1.3.3 and a 4GB card. We were able to install Raspbian and Minecraft but then ran into space issues when trying to add Chromium.

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If you are running into this space issue with 1.3.3 and a 4GB card, looks like there are three options to consider:

1) Get a bigger SD card. Easy long term fix but might be annoying to have to make another trip to the store to get everything up and running (we had to make a couple initial trips to get an HDMI to DVI adapter, and lower powered USB keyboard and mouse).

2) Download the full version of NOOBS 1.3.3 and then delete the OS versions that you don’t plan to use. I’m not sure if you can just delete the folders and be good to go though.

3) Download NOOBS Lite 1.3.3 and let the installer download the selected OS image from the internet. You will have to connect via an ethernet cable to do this.

There may be other options but these are the three we could see. We went with the Lite version. It took a while to download but is working fine now and we have a fair amount of space free.

Hope this helps someone. We are new to this so we might not be the best source of help, but wanted to post our experience.

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Well done! V4L2 looks very promising here :)

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Great news!

If you don’t mind me asking: what is the current status of wayland/weston?

The Raspberry Pi Guy

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How do we update an existing SD card to this new version? The existing card used v1.3.2 and has additional software installed.

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I downloaded the image, checked the SHA1 checksum, installed Raspbian and started with “sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2”. But everything I get is “operation not supported”. Even “modprobe … -vvv doesn’t” give me some hints… Anyone with the same problem?

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Just to clarify: it turned out that the micro-connector from the camera module to the camera board PCB has been loose. Now everything is working.

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Just downloaded the new NOOBS v1.3.3 and installed on a freshly formatted SD card. Installed Raspian and when I run update I Get the following when “reading package lists.”

W: GPG error: http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG ED4BF9140C50B1C5 Collabora Raspbian Archive Signing Key

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got the same error on update mine had an email address in it ..
W: GPG error: http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG ED4BF9140C50B1C5 Collabora Raspbian Archive Signing Key

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Hello,

raspbian is noteably faster. Great.
One problem: I am using the python RPIO-Library for PWM to the GPIO, DMA channel 0. This worked fine since October.
When I activate this with current raspbian, and move some windows, then the system freezes and crashes.
I assume, that channel 0 is now used by the system and no longer free for application purpose.
The question is, which dma channel is free to use ?

Greetings, Gerhard

I am running an afterschool workshop, and stable PWM is mandatory for some projects the kids are running.

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See my comment #2 above. The new turbo framebuffer is using DMA channel 0. Do not know if RPIO is updated already.

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If you are using this package http://pythonhosted.org/RPIO/pwm_py.html then you can choose the DMA channel yourself. See the docs. I am using DMA channel 14 which works fine with the latest kernel and fbturbo.

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Thank you for your comments. I changed the dmachannel away from 0 to 1, and the app works stable.

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Hi, as I had to reinstall my pi I just downloaded the new noobs 1.3.3 and put it on my SD Card. It seems to work well but wenn lounching noobs it says it’s version 1.3.2 instead of 1.3.3 at it’s title screen. Don’t know if it is my fault but I don’t know what I could have done wrong. The SHA Checksum was OK and after installing raspbian it only found 2 Updates via apt-get – so I guess noobs is just displaying the wrong version number?

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I installed all of the OS options on a 16 GB card and when I tried to startx in Raspbian on an Original Flavor 256 MB Model B, I got a bunch of “No protocol specified” errors, followed by “xinit: giving up” through “xinit: server error” messages. I tried GPU memory at both 64 and 128 MB, but no dice.

Also, Pidora doesn’t seem to have enough disk space to be able to write anything, as the file system used is at 100%. I opted for the ext4 partition offered in the NOOBS setup – is that visible to all of the Linux-based OS flavors?

Finally, RISC OS doesn’t respond to mouse/trackpad input, although the keyboard works fine. Both work fine in other OS flavors, at least when I’m able to get to a GUI.

Dropping back to NOOBS 1.3.2 on the 256 MB Pi, and will try 1.3.3 on a first-gen 512 MB Model B next.

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I hade the same problem, to start the “startx” after 1.3.3 installation. Removed one OS to get more free space (on my 4G SD), and waited ca 5 minutes for startx to start. And it started.

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Did reinstall with just Raspbian and everything is OK (and performance increase is noticeable), but it’s silly that this corner case exists if everything fits on a 16 GB card when installed. Us techies can fix it easily enough, but others expecting to be able to sample everything are going to be puzzled. This will also be a common use case at Jams where we want to be able to show off everything quickly. Having to niggle and jiggle things is an unnecessary source of user friction/inertia that slows adoption. One person making the fix at the source will save many other people a disproportionately large amount of time. Granted, it’s easy enough to just not install RaspBMC or OpenELEC as either can adequately demonstrate the media streaming capabilities, but it would be nice to have this tweaked to work as noob users of NOOBS would expect.

Thanks for the effort to accomplish these spectacular improvements, in any case!

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This should be fixed in NOOBS 1.3.4 :-)
(we’ve increased Raspbian’s minimum partition size)

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I feel like I’m going insane but I can’t seem to d/l v1.3.3. The lite version appears to be v1.3.2 and the full version says v1.3.3 but when I boot from the SD card it says v1.3.2…

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Haven’t downloaded yet but if in doubt that you have the right image you can do a direct download.

So, 100% sure it’s the right one.
http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/NOOBS/images/NOOBS-2013-12-24/

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Don’t worry, NOOBS is actually version 1.3 the .3 / .4 is all about the enclosed OSes and therefore NOOBS lite hasn’t changed!

Gordon

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The title of Menu of NOOBS says “NOOBS V1.3.2 Nov 2 2013”.
Is it just forgotten to update for the title?

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this is not especially related to this topic, but who is responsible for the actuality of the images on the http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads webpage?!
OpenELEC Stable – Raspberry Pi ARM Version:3.2.4 is available 2013-11-27 12:51:37 on
http://openelec.tv/get-openelec/download
but on raspberry pi page is an outdated version from 2013-09-14.

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:oops: … yes, that’s for NOOBS,
but what about the web page link of the OpenELEC image further down itself?
NOOBS and downloading a actual image and publishing it on that web page, is this such inseparable process?

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The way it currently works, is that the standalone OS images and the NOOBS OS images get updated at the same time. In the future (watch this space) this will become even more integrated.

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I have downloaded and extracted NOOBS 1.3.3 but when I put my SD card into my pi and power it up, nothing happens. I am using the composite output, but even when I push 3 or 4 on my keyboard nothing happens. I know my keyboard is working because it lights up when I push caps lock etc. I am not sure if I am doing anything wrong or whether this is a software problem.

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I had a similar problem earlier my issue was caused by me not formatting the card properly, initially I did a quick format and when booting the Pi no lights other than the red one, I reformatted the card using a full (overwrite) and transfered the file again and now all is working although I am using HDMI.

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Ok thanks I’ll try that

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That worked, thank you so much

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Well, it did work, then I got an ‘entering kdb due to keyboard entry’ error, which I looked up and people say that the only way to fix that is to reformat and reload the card, which I did in exactly the same way as when it started to work. Ive tried reformatting and copying the files across twice now and I have the same problem I had originally.

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How do I apt-get fbturbo?

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sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-fbturbo

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When I do that I get:

E: Unable to locate package xserver-xorg-video-fbturbo

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Have you done a `sudo apt-get update`?

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Yes. Just did it again. Still same error.

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You’re running one of the Foundation’s Raspbian wheezy images? You should have the foundation repo installed (you’ll have the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list with the line `deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy main`).

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I think there are some lines missing on /etc/init.d/mathkernel

After installing minidlna server, it conflicts with it. I worked around this by adding the following lines in /etc/init.d/mathkernel

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: mathkerneld
# Required-Start:
# Required-Stop:
# Should-Start:
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:
# Short-Description: mathkerneld
### END INIT INFO

But I am not sure if those are the correct lines

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Forgot to say it is on raspbian

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when installing NOOBS on my 4GB SD and putting it into my pi I either get the rainbow screen or just green screen. What doe this mean and how do i fix it?

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This should now be fixed by NOOBS 1.3.4 on the Downloads page.

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I have formatted my card fully (twice) and downloaded NOOBS 1.3.3 and extracted it onto my card. However, all I get when I plug the card into my pi is a blank screen and the ACT LED in groups of 4. Please help me!

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