Jessie Is Here
Jessie is here? Who’s Jessie? Wasn’t she the cowgirl doll in “Toy Story 2” – you know, the one who got abandoned in a park to that Sarah McLachlan song, resulting in at least one software engineer finding he had something in his eye at that point…?
Yes, it is that Jessie, but not in that context. The Raspbian operating system is based on Debian Linux, and the different versions of Debian are named after characters from the “Toy Story” films. Recent versions of Raspbian have been based on Debian Wheezy (the penguin who’s lost his squeaker in “Toy Story 2”), but Raspbian has now been updated to the new stable version of Debian, which is called Jessie.
So what’s new?
Many of the changes between Wheezy and Jessie are invisible to the end-user. There are modifications to the underlying system to improve performance and flexibility, particularly as regards the control of system processes, and as with any update, there are numerous bug fixes and tweaks. And at the same time as the upgrade to Jessie, we’ve added a bunch of changes and improvements to the desktop user interface.
Look and feel
The first thing anyone starting the new Jessie image from scratch will notice is that the default behaviour is to boot straight to the desktop GUI, not to the Linux command line. This was a decision taken because this is the expected behaviour for all modern computers; the default interface for a personal computer in 2015 is a desktop GUI, not just text on a screen. It is still possible to set the Pi to boot to the command line for people who prefer that – just toggle the relevant setting in the Raspberry Pi Configuration application described below.
When the desktop launches, you might notice some slight tweaks to the appearance of things like menus, check boxes and radio buttons. This is because the appearance of Raspbian is now based on version 3 of GTK+, the user interface toolkit used for the LXDE desktop environment. The older version 2 of GTK+ is slowly being replaced with version 3 in many applications, so this change was inevitable at some point – the new appearance isn’t a huge change, but does look slightly more modern. Many of the applications in Raspbian are still using GTK+ version 2, but the PiX theme for GTK+2 has been changed to bring it into line with that for GTK+3.
You’ll notice on the menu bar that there is now an eject icon at the top right – this is a new plug-in that allows USB drives and the like to be safely ejected without the risk of losing data. It’s slightly risky to just pull out a USB drive, particularly if you have just copied a file to it, as the system manages the write to a drive in the background, and the write takes a finite amount of time. If you pull the drive out before the write has finished, you’ll corrupt the file and lose data – clicking the eject icon and then selecting the drive to remove waits for any pending writes to complete and then prompts that it is safe to remove the drive.
Office applications
One of our main aims with regard to Raspberry Pi is not just to make it a great cheap computer for education, but also to make it a great cheap computer in its own right. To this end, we want to make it possible to use a Pi to do the sort of things you’d do on a Mac or a PC, so we’re including some more applications that we think people will find useful. In this release, we have added the LibreOffice suite and Claws Mail.
LibreOffice is a full-featured office suite which is compatible with Microsoft Office files – it includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, vector drawing and database programs, all of which should feel familiar to anyone used to using Office. It has had some optimisation for Pi, and runs pretty well, particularly on Pi 2.
Claws Mail is an email client for those of us who are old-fashioned enough to prefer not to do email through a browser – it supports all common email protocols, and offers all the functionality of a standalone mail client like Windows Mail or Thunderbird.
Java tools
There are also two new applications in the Programming category – these are two new environments for writing Java applications, called BlueJ and Greenfoot (from the University of Kent and Oracle). If you’re interested in learning Java, or already a Java programmer, have a look at them. There are some sample projects for both in the /home/pi/Documents directory.
Settings and configuration
There are a couple of new settings dialogs in this release, found under the Preferences entry in the main menu. The first is Raspberry Pi Configuration – this is a GUI version of the old raspi-config command-line application, which provides all the same functionality in a nicer interface. (The old raspi-config is still on the system and can be accessed from the command line by typing “sudo raspi-config”, but it shouldn’t be necessary to do so any more.)
The new Raspberry Pi Configuration allows you to enable and disable interfaces, tweak performance and configure internationalisation options, such as timezone and keyboard. It also allows some more control over boot options than was available in the past, with the option to automatically log in as the “pi” user available when booting to both CLI and desktop.
There is a new keyboard setting dialog, accessed from the Localisation tab, but hopefully many people won’t need this – the system will detect some common keyboards sold for use with Pi and set up the GUI keyboard driver correctly. If that doesn’t happen, it’s now easy to choose the right country and keyboard type in this dialog.
The other new setting dialog is the Main Menu Editor. This is a Pi version of a menu editor called Alacarte, written in Python – this should make it easier for people to add or remove items to the main menu. (And, by popular demand, the Other menu is back on the system – but it will now only appear if applications are installed that don’t appear in any other categories…)
Updated applications
There are updates to several of the applications that used to come with Raspbian. There are new versions of Scratch, Sonic Pi, and the Epiphany web browser; none of these have changed fundamentally in operation, but they all include bug fixes and performance improvements.
Support has been added for some of the new Pi peripherals that have been released recently, including the Sense HAT as used in Astro Pi – this is now supported under Scratch and Python.
Python users used to have to launch Python with sudo in order to allow access to the GPIO lines – Python can now access GPIOs as a standard user. Also for Python, the Pygame Zero game environment is installed by default – have a look at pygame-zero.readthedocs.org for information on what it can do.
One final small thing – if you want to get a screenshot of your Pi, just press the Print Screen button on your keyboard. A PNG file will be put in your home directory, thanks to the (slightly strangely named) scrot utility.
Where can I get it?
This is a major version upgrade – due to the large number of changes to the underlying operating system, we strongly recommend using Jessie from a clean image, so you’ll need to download a new Jessie image from the downloads page on our site. (Some people have had problems extracting the zip files, as the large size of the image file causes zip to use a different format internally. They can be successfully unzipped with 7-Zip on Windows and The Unarchiver on Mac – both are free applications.)
Starting with a clean image is the recommended way to move to Jessie. If you really need to update a Wheezy image, we have tried an unsupported upgrade path which is documented on the forums here. This has been shown to work on a vanilla Wheezy image, but we can’t predict what effect it may have on any packages or data that you have installed, so this is very much at your own risk. Feel free to add your experiences and improvements to the upgrade process to the forum so others can benefit.
As ever, your feedback on the release is very much welcome – do add a comment below, and I’ll try to respond to as many as I can.
324 comments
Ben Nuttall
Sudo-less GPIO access!!!!!
Phil
This appears to work for i2c and SPI too, which is brilliant news. I’ve run PiGlow and Dot3k both without sudo so far. Unicorn HAT still requires it, but it uses funky disco magic to make things work so that was expected.
Yaaaaaay!
My crazy product installers still work, also.
William H. Bell
Sudo-less SPI and I2C access has been working for sometime.
JohnP
So I may be doing something wrong but after upgrading to Jessie I am still receiving errors when trying to access GPIO (for PIR sensor) without using sudo.
When I attempt to run my script with out sudo I get the following error:
RuntimeError: No access to /dev/mem. Try running as root!
Thanks,
John
Michael Horne
Good news. Can we get a feel on how big the install ends up being, though? The 8GB card owners (which is most people) are sweating.
Les Pounder
Hi mate
The image is 4.3GB in size. I’ve just got the download myself and that is the size of the .img file.
@Raspberry Pi. Top work removing the sudo requirement, that will help a lot of people :)
Average Man
I must have missed the last few updates then…for how long have 4Gb cards been redundant? Is there a ‘slim’ version for those of us that don’t want all the extra whizzy stuff? I would have thought the image would be minimal and then just install what you want/need?
sean007
I use a 32 GB card as I always have. They are cheap enough now that there seems no point in using anything smaller.
L B
On Adafruit website, there is a script file for setting the boot loader on a small SD card an the operating system on an external hard drive. I have one using a Passport 250 g drive.
Nostromov
Hadn’t realized that it’s possible to run these HUGE sizes… Meaning it can be the full operating system, nice! So, anyway, forget about Debian; you need its variant: Xubuntu /or Mint. IMO, the Xfce experience is gr8!..:)
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
The installed image has about 3GB free on an 8GB card.
Dawid
Almost 5GB image size? Does the image fit on the Compute Module (4GB eMMC Flash)?
Ben Nuttall
No – but we’ll be producing a lite image for use with the Compute Module soon.
Dawid
Great news! “Soon” means days, weeks or months? :)
Greg Macaree
Will the lite image work on ‘normal’ Pi’s too? I run a number of headless PI servers doing various things and the first job is always to remove X etc…
Mike T.
Quite by chance I was messing about with Diederik de Haas’ unattented installer only a couple of days ago, with the aim of getting it to work using a serial console.
If you want a minmimal system this is certainly that, a minimal install only uses aproximatly 500Mb.
See https://mike632t.wordpress.com/2015/09/26/raspbian-minimal-install-using-console/ – if you already run linux you should be able to follow these instructions verbatim.
(Windows users will have to figure out how to decompress the image and write it to an SD card themselves).
Jarle Teigland
So in theory one could fit a ‘minimal’ or reduced install on a 4Gb card – say take away Wolfram & Libreoffice for use on a Model A / B ??
Raul
In my case, when I put Jessie on an 8gb SD card, only 80-something MB are left unused. Any idea why would this happen?
SandPox
Why can’t we just use the armhf build from Debian official? I’m using Debian Jessie months already and having no problem with it.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
You can – we’re not stopping you! But we think that the new applications and features added to this release over and above Jessie itself will be useful to many people (which is what the blog post above is mostly about). If they aren’t useful to you, then feel free to use whatever OS version you prefer.
Ben Nuttall
You can (and feel free to) but Raspbian is the official and supported distribution which is optimised for Raspberry Pi and we deal with support queries on our forums. Also Raspbian comes bundled with educational software – which is what Raspberry Pi is all about.
Phil
At long last. One problem… it’s upside-down! :P
dom
If you are talking about the Pi LCD, then you can add lcd_rotate=2 to config.txt to flip it.
Phil
I know, I know, I was being sarcastic! You know how hard it is editing a config file while stood on your head? Not very, but it might result in some serious injuries!
Ken Wray
just turn the monitor 180 deg it stops the brain ache
monoplex
Or Pi radians.
Matt Hawkins
I always like a new Raspbian release and all the changes above I’m either in favour of or neutral.
However I would love an official Raspbian “lite” for people who are not interested in the desktop environment. i.e. no Java, LibreOffice, browser, email client etc. If you want to make robot that just makes the system a bit on the bulky side. It’s a shame to retire 4GB cards if all you need to do is basic Scratch, GPIO etc.
The Raspi-config GUI and USB eject are great features :-)
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Watch this space – we are aware that Raspbian is now getting quite large, and a “lite” version is on the to-do list.
exartemarte
Looking forward to that! I enjoy the occasional play with desk-top Pi, but mostly I use it headless on robots and other projects that just don’t need all that stuff.
Andrew Oakley
I too would very much appreciate a CLI-only / headless-focussed official Raspbian image. At the moment I brew my own for webcams, robots, servers etc. but having an official one would make it a lot easier for me to reference it in tutorials for Cotswold Raspberry Jam.
Plus, second hand 2 gig SD cards can be picked up in bulk for truly silly money. Getting rid of the desktop shrinks Debian to under 1.5GB and you can fairly easily get it down to under 800MB if you really try.
Just to let you know that any work on this would be very much appreicated; thanks.
Matt Hawkins
That is brilliant news!
Lukasz Surzycki
well done installed in my cluster of Rpi’s
thanks
ColinD
Aye, for robots it’s a bit OTT. The ever excellent Ryan Walmsley wrote a guide to SD image smallification a while back that I use as the go-to for my robots:
http://ryanteck.org.uk/rpi-sd-card-image-smallification/
sfsdf
I too would very much appreciate a CLI-only / headless-focussed official Raspbian image.
Please allow for using the display output ports.
It’s useful for some situations.
Kiosk, tv-output, other…
NedTheNerd
The lite version should have been the first thing on the list not an afterthought.
Regards
Jim
Raspberry Pi is first and foremost an EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. A lite version should NEVER be first on the list.
That an official lite version is being considered at all should be viewed as a pleasant EXTRA, not something to ever be EXPECTED.
Newbelius
From my experience, the educational uses typically do not require an office package or the like. Many PIs are used to teach interfacing and such. For that, a lite OS is VERY much to be EXPECTED.
stu
Surely to educate you should start from the beginning, or as close to it as you can. ie an empty but working os. Then you add things as you want. I’d love to see vim-tiny replaced for vim for starters if only for the backspace button to work.
tai viinikka
Thanks for that, Simon et al. Headless will be brilliant.
Paul Sutton
A lite version of raspbian would be most welcome,
Leo
This is awesome news. Excited to hear more.
Phil
+1 to this suggestion. No matter how many alternate sources we might be able to get a Jessie distribution, crunched down version of Raspbian or otherwise from, I think there’s a lot of merit in having a trusted, official distribution of “Raspbian Lite” with all the extra cruft removed.
Ben Nuttall
It might not be exactly what you’re after, but a lite image is coming soon. It won’t have any of the bundled additional software, and won’t have X. You could always build up from there.
edwinj85
Awesome. That will be perfect for my headless server :D
Juha
I’ll wait for that. It is easier to add missing things than remove the extra. Hopefully it arrives soon.
paddy
+1 for the switch to jessie (for many reasons)
+1 for a lite version. An important element of the educational message of the Raspberry Pi is that “you” the user are in charge and can make the decisions about what software to install!
David Glover-Aoki
Will the command-line version of raspi-config be maintained? It would really suck to be forced into a GUI just to use it.
Ben Nuttall
Yes, it will. It’s very handy for using over SSH.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Yes, the GUI sits on top of the command-line version of raspi-config, which has just had a few tweaks to make it usable in that fashion. The intention is that any changes to one will be echoed in the other going forward.
Lee
Is this on the Noobs Image? or is it only on the Raspbian Image?
AndrewS
Both :-)
Kev Partner
Some fantastic new features = hurray!
No upgrade path = boo!
Only this weekend I spent hours setting up a new Pi only to find I’m going to have to start all over again. Bummer.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
There is an upgrade path, but we can’t guarantee how well it will work; there’s just too much changed in a major Debian version upgrade. I’d suggest backing up your card and trying the process described on the forum post linked above – there’s a good chance it’ll work. (Or at least mostly work…)
Martin O’Hanlon
All positive moves. Boot to X makes me feel a bit funny, but thats my problem to get over!
Ben Nuttall
That’s just the default. It’s easily changed in raspi-config!
FoTL
Has this been optimised to also work on a 256 MB Pi1 ?
Anyway great news, well done to the RPF Team.
Looking forward to a “Lite” version, expanding options is always good.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
We haven’t done any particular optimisations for Pi 1, but we have tested the new release on Pi 1 hardware and haven’t noticed any significant degradation in performance compared to previous releases.
beta-tester
nice, i was waiting long time for it, to have it officially in NOOBS.
BTW.: why is ARCH in NOOBS that way outdated as it is? there are actual images available on the ARCH webside for RPi(1) and RPi2… why is it not an RPi2 version available in NOOBS???
AndrewS
https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/issues/241
The ArchLinux team are no longer providing NOOBS-installable versions of their distro.
beta-tester
and if i try to do… would it be populated to NOOBS?
AndrewS
Only if it had “official blessing” from the ArchLinux team.
dobra-dobra
There is a hope that modern Arduino IDE will work now. Fingers crossed!
Jonathan Pallant
At what point will you stop building out a) updates and b) security fixes for Raspbian Wheezy?
Weeks? Months? Years?
Andrew Oakley
You make an important and valuable point, but in mitigation, the use of an open-source operating system means that we are not dependent solely on the Foundation for updates. So, yes, you’re right to be concerned, but no, it isn’t fundamentally critical for those of us with valid legacy use cases.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Moving forward, Raspbian will be Jessie based – we do not anticipate further Wheezy releases.
The software team at Pi Towers is very small – unfortunately, we don’t have the manpower to maintain and support multiple versions.
Andrew Oakley
My understanding is that the Foundation has employees that contribute to Raspbian, but that Raspbian is itself an independent entity which has contributors both from and not from the Foundation.
So surely Raspbian Wheezy will continue to, at least, get downstream security updates from Debian, administered by, hopefully, the lovely non-Foundation volunteers over at Raspbian ?
I’m thinking Rbn Wheezy’s status will just move from “officially supported by the Foundation” to “maintained by volunteers”. Does my understanding sound right?
Peter Green
Raspbian is a project run pretty much by myself (mike doesn’t do anything significant on it nowadays). Raspbian basically rebuilds debian armhf with reduced CPU requirements fixing problems run into along the way.
On top of raspbian the raspberry pi foundation add their own packages and build images.
Confusingly the raspberry pi foundation and much of the community often reffer to the raspberry pi foundation raspbian image as raspbian.
Raspbian wheezy will almost certainly keep pulling in updates that can be pulled automatically from Debian wheezy until Debian stops providing them. Updates that require manual attention are more likely to get neglected (though they often get neglected already :( )
From the sounds of things it seems like the raspberry pi foundation’s packages builing on top of wheezy are unlikely to be getting any more updates.
Leo Leibovici
Looking forward to the lite version.
On the full version, I feel that defaulting to X is a mistake. It goes away from the ethos often cited by Eban that it was good “in the old days” that all you got was a command prompt and had to learn how to use it.
Leo
Over-40
Noooo! Defaulting to a desktop and finally having controls or things like overscan is the best news ever.
I spent the whole of my first evening with a first-batch Pi trying – and failing – to get the Pi to fill my living room 1080p TV screen with a picture that wasn’t blurry and didn’t have ugly black borders. I failed. That Pi has much dust on it now; I figured if I couldn’t make the display work there was no way I’d ever be able to do anything else work either. So I’ve stuck to PCs, plus PICs for the small hobbyist stuff.
Leo Leibovici
Well you should have persevered! You always had the ability to select boot to x(as well as overscan enabled or disabled) for raspi-config.
Nothing changes here except that the *default* is to display the desktop
Over-40
The out of the box experience for Linux newbies in March 2012 was somewhat different from the experience today. I found it all quite user-hostile even though I’m no stranger to command lines (I’ve been using them since 1980 and still often use DOS commands in Windows 7). Other computers have managed to produce crisp 1080p images on 1080p screens for years. Perhaps I *should* have persevered, but the fact remains that it proved beyond my ability to get a CLEAR (ie not blurry, 100% screen pixel to display pixel) image. Turning overscan on and off just changed the level of blurriness. For the record, I consider a 720p image on a 1080p display unusably poor.
I’m afraid your “Nothing changes…” comment is incorrect: one of the things highlighted on this announcement page is “a GUI version of the old raspi-config command-line application”.
I mean this in a constructive manner: I think this release has probably brought the Raspberry Pi roughly up to the level of a Windows 95 PC, when viewed in pure consumer terms. You still get a load of gobbledygook flashing past during the boot up phase but you are eventually presented with a pretty front end that looks passably modern. (I fully understand that there are valid reasons one might want to boot only to a command line once you know what you’re doing).
I expect there will be a ‘silent’ boot in the none too distant future. My TV has an embedded computer of some kind but when I switch it on it doesn’t proudly tell me how it’s counting its RAM chips in case they’ve mysteriously turned into opamps overnight. Likewise, my phone plays a pretty little animation at startup whilst there’s all kinds of Linuxing (or whatever) paddling furiously in the background. If I want to get my hands dirty in my (Android) phone’s internals I can do so; likewise of course the Pi, and it’s probably easier on the latter. But the out of the box experience of a modern phone is immeasurably better than that of a Pi in 2012. And I don’t have to faff around to make the pixels line up.
Mike
Blah, Blah, Blah. You dont get the point.
ITS MORE FUN WITH THAT WAY.
and i am more concise
Polski Ogorki
Raspbian Jessie on a Pi 2 is so vastly superior to the Windows 95 experience, if you just stop to appreciate it. My first compy ever was a Win95 machine (back in 1997). Let’s all have a good laugh at how badly it sucked in comparison:
– It costed $2400. Not $35.
– It was loud. Not solid state.
– It was 75 MHz. Not ~1000 MHz.
– It had 4 MB RAM. Not 1024 MB RAM.
– It had a 14.4 modem. Not an ethernet jack.
– It had 1 MB video RAM. Not as much as you’d like from the 1024 MB.
– It had a floppy drive. Not an SD card slot.
– It had no USB ports. You don’t want to know all the crazy ports there used to be, which USB replaced.
– It came with Minesweeper. Not Minecraft.
– When Windows 98 came out, it was not free. Rasbian Jesse is.
– You could program in BASIC. Not Python/Ruby/many other fine languages.
– It would BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) if you farted too loudly. Raspbian is rock solid in comparison.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
The “boot to X or boot to CLI” argument is one that has been going on for some time here at Pi Towers, and people have very strong views on it.
The reason for moving to boot to GUI is that this is how modern computers work – Mac, Windows, many flavours of Linux, all boot to GUI by default. Yes, many years ago, boot to CLI was the default and it was indeed all we had “in the good old days”, but it doesn’t reflect the way people use computers nowadays. We don’t want Pi to appear as a throwback to the way computers used to be; we want it to appear as a modern PC in its own right, and particularly with Pi 2, the GUI is very usable in terms of speed and responsiveness.
Kathleen
More to the point: those who know how to start the GUI are more likely to know how to disable the GUI. I realize this is easy to do with raspi-config, but first time users have plenty of other more interesting things to learn.
Bill Robinson
Spot on. This release sounds like a first rate improvement across the board, and those who disagree are precisely those with the knowledge to be able to readily turn off the changes, presumably? I’d best stop there…
Polski Ogorki
Indeed, spot on. The simple, convenient, non-threatening thing should always be presented to the user first, whenever possible.
Then if the user is feeling courageous (and not all of them are, you know), *then* they can move up to the advanced thing.
If you really want to, all it takes is a CTRL+ALT+F1 to zing out to the text console, in the blink of an eye. CTRL+ALT+F7 brings you back into XFCE.
That ~ 1024 MB of RAM **that you virtually never use up** is so bountiful-feeling, that it’s not a sin to wastefully just leave XFCE running, totally ignored, if you are uninterested in using it.
Polski Ogorki
Oops, I meant to say LXDE, not XFCE. But you know what I mean. :)
Leo Leibovici
We will have to agree to disagree then Simon!
I’m a bit long in the tooth, but many of my younger colleagues simply can’t cope if they do not have some sort of pretty GUI, because they have been brought up in the Microsoft era. Let’s not add to the problem!
I’m surprised you are trying to position the Pi as a replacement cheap PC. Even the Pi 2 is not really fast enough for that role. But for most other tasks, the Pi is brilliant. I must have about 10 of them doing various tasks. Only one of them is regularly used as a desktop – and that is mostly to see how the desktop has progressed over time.
James Hughes
I’ve 50 (nearly), and grew up through BBC Micro’s, PC’s with DOS then windows.
I praised the day when GUI’s became the standard.
Of course, I still use the command line when I need to (a lot) and for some things it’s a better options, (I ran a short workshop on Linux command line at the Pi birthday bash!). But for the huge majority, the GUI is the way to go. It gives people an easy in, then they can start using the command line as necessary.
312capri
I’ll be eighty this year! My wife purchased me a Raspberry Pi 2 as a Christmas present. As an engineer I started my career on a UNIVAC 1103 and progressed through the IBM 7094 direct coupled to a 7044. My engineering group started designing digital systems around the 4004, 8080 and Z80 in the early seventies. In the early eighties I worked in the first generation of office automation. The Raspberry Pi 2 is terrific, especially to a guy who only dreamed of Dick Tracy wrist radios and studied vacuum tube technology during the nineteen fifties in college. A great opportunity to today’s youngsters.
markit
Yes, who care if intended target of Pi is educational, and CLI boot was GREAT to let children see that a computer is not like a electrodomestic, but is software taking control to the hardware, and the GUI is just software that you can run or not!
Let’s follow the “closed product you can’t touch or know how it works” trend by Apple and M$, right?
And don’t tell me that can be disabled, is not the same effect as having it by default.
pudding
Yes, a sad day for the Pi. I was always impressed how the original Pi booted to the console and showed kids what was really underneath a fancy & dumb GUI. Looks like the foundation wants to push the Pi as just another PC – Office apps too?!?!
James Hughes
Er, no. To both posts.
Polski Ogorki
Simon said:
“The “boot to X or boot to CLI” argument is one that has been going on for some time here at Pi Towers, and people have very strong views on it.”
I think those in the “boot to X” camp would do well to watch (repeatedly, if necessary) the ominous, deep video “Elephant’s Dream”:
https://orange.blender.org/
Please deeply contemplate what this video has to say, people. The video is very insightful, when you realize that the character “Proog” is an old-school, hard-arsed, Unix boffin, who is trying to show the beauty of Linux to “Emo”, who is a generation younger, and has a hard time seeing the beauty for himself.
Each and every scene has an insightful message for you to learn from.
Polski Ogorki
Oops, when I said ‘I think those in the “boot to X” camp’, I meant to say ‘I think those in the “boot to CLI” camp’ (who would do well to watch “Elephant’s Dream”).
Leo Leibovici
s/Eban/Eben/
Sorry Eben
Andrew Oakley
As well as echoing others’ thanks, may I add a particular thanks for sudo-less GPIO.
I run GPIO Python tutorials at Cotswold Raspberry Jam – last Saturday we had 20 kids making and coding Lego traffic lights ( http://www.cotswoldjam.org/index.php/archives/349 ).
It was very frustrating switching between IDLE for editing Python (syntax highlighting is very useful for beginners, for one) and a terminal session for running sudo python. Being able to just “run module” from within IDLE will make GPIO tutorials a lot smoother and easier to understand.
I’m old school and colour blind, so if I ruled the world all interfaces would be a monochrome CLI & curses, but the fact of the matter is that almost anyone training for a job in development will be using an integrated development environment these days. We need to teach our kids using the tools we expect them to use.
Thanks for doing this work.
Texy
…but you can run ‘sudo idle’ to get over that hurdle can’t you?
Texy
Ben Croston
You don’t need to ‘sudo’ anything that uses RPi.GPIO any more. Much more beginner friendly!
Andrew Oakley
Yeah… if you launch IDLE from a command line… ;-)
Chris Katko
So… ALT-F2 (run dialog)
gksudo my_program_that_needs_root
?
Michael
BlueJ (using Java) also accesses the GPIO without the need for sudo. Another way to program the GPIOs easily now. See:
http://www.bluej.org/raspberrypi/led.html
Michael
Brian Gilhuly
Yes, but according to the BlueJ documentation, it runs all your code as root, even though the IDE runs as an ordinary user. If I understand Ben correctly, in Python it is only the RPi.GPIO module that runs with elevated privileges; the rest of your code runs as an ordinary user. Seems safer that way.
Andrew Mulholland
Do we have any rough ETA for an updated Spindle version for this image release? Would make those of us that base our projects off Raspbian able to get to work on updating them without having to reverse engineer how the changes were added to this new release.
https://github.com/RPi-Distro/spindle
exartemarte
Suddenly Epiphany, the default browser, is usable. I know it hasn’t been everyone’s experience, but in previous releases I have found that it would take, typically, two to three minutes to download a simple web page, making it effectively unusable. I don’t suppose I’ll use it much – mostly I run my Pi’s headless – but it’s nice to know it works at last.
James
Is there a build for the Pi2?
Ben Nuttall
The image we provide works on both Pi 1 and Pi 2.
wallyware
No more SUDO required for GPIO functions!
HIP! HIP!
HURRAH!
HIP! HIP!
HURRAH!
HIP! HIP!
HURRAH!
ric96
Yayaayyaaayayaaa…. Finally!!!
BUT, i hope the upgrade method was a bit easier :(
wallyware
Anybody else have problems unzipping the image file? Windows 7 is reporting that the decompressed image is 734 Petabytes which is just a wee bit bigger than my hard drive.
goranche
yes, I’m having problems on OS X as well…
warning [2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip]: 76 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
error [2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip]: reported length of central directory is
-76 bytes too long (Atari STZip zipfile? J.H.Holm ZIPSPLIT 1.1
zipfile?). Compensating…
skipping: 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Try The Unarchiver on OSX – that works for me. 7-Zip works on Windows. Both are free.
It seems that zip uses a different archive format for files over 4GB in size, and this isn’t universally supported by all unarchivers.
Winkleink
7-Zip worked for me on Windows 7.
Looks like Windows built in Compression cannot handle the file size.
goranche
I actually have The Unarchiver, not sure when OS X decided to use the default Archive Utility again… seeing the error, I tried the command line…
oh well, thanks ;)
wallyware
Yep, 7-zip worked for me as well. Thanks for the tip.
Milliways
OK I downloaded and installed The Unarchiver.
When I run it it opens the Preferences menu and quits when I close the menu.
There doesn’t seem to be any entry in the File menu to actually open a file. How do I unzip this?
PS Why didn’t use use a sensible format like gz
Milliways
On the Mac the following works, and doesn’t need any oter paackage instaalled.
tar -xf 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip
Anton
Thanks! That worked for me!
Herman B.
No problems at all with downloading and Unarchiving Jessie on my iMac (with MacOS 10.6.8) over here. But it took me hours and hours before I was able to write the 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img to a SD, although i’ve tried nearly all the options mentioned under http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup. Finally RPI-sd card builder v1.2 (https://alltheware.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/easiest-way-sd-card-setup/) did the job for me. This should be made a lot easier on a Mac, I mean, isn’t that what I bought a Mac for?
Ajren
I use Pi-Baker, it works a treat on my Imac.
AndrewS
Confirmed on my Windows7 laptop (perhaps it’s a bug in the Zip functionality built-in to WindowsExplorer?).
Peazip is able to extract the image okay though.
Sukkin Pang
I have the same problem on Windows. Works fine on a Mac.
FoTL
See forum post
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=121867
sam
Does this have the opensource accelerated X drivers https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/ yet?
Andrew Pinder
Bump
David M
HUGE thanks for the work done on these distros!!! I wholly applaud the move to GUI as default for all the reasons you mentioned. I, personally, am grateful that a headless version is bring worked on as well – very, very cool of y’all to do that!IF
And the no-sudo GPIO is great – for learning, for writing applications in Python, etc. My most-hit blog post is on seting GPIO to not need sudo – now that is no longer relevant. Yay!
This is a great build, in my opinion! Thanks again for the work!
Daniel
Wouldn’t there be rather appreciable performance gains from building a version with –mcpu=cortex-a7 rather than continuing to saddle Pi 2 users with armv6 binaries?
The capabilities of Pi2 are so vastly different from Pi 1. Why not publish two images — or even just leave Pi 1 on Wheezy and focus on Pi2 going forward?
Eben Upton
If anyone is able to demonstrate a measurable performance advantage we’d certainly consider it. We’ve really struggled to find any benefit ourselves, and so have stuck to a single image.
bobzr
Great news! finally Jessie is here :) Thanks to the devs. Now with the power of the Pi2 I would like to use Xfce instead of LXDE. Will I lose all the new applications and features added to this release if I remove LXDE? (Especially the eject icon at the top right?).
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
I believe that Xfce by default does not use lxpanel, which is the application which provides the menu bar at the top of the screen. The USB eject icon is a plugin for lxpanel, so you wouldn’t be able to use it under Xfce.
I wrote the plugin based on a Ubuntu application called ejecter – you might be able to get that to run under Xfce, but it may need quite a bit of hacking about to build and run cleanly.
whheydt
What? It isn’t just “sync; sync; umount ….; echo ….”?
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
If you do “apt-get source lxpanel” and then look in the plugins/ejecter directory, you’ll find that it is actually a bit more complicated than that…
Stefan
Great work, thank you for the OS update!
I am just a bit nervous because of this part: “The old raspi-config is still on the system and can be accessed from the command line by typing “sudo raspi-config”, but it shouldn’t be necessary to do so any more”.
Please keep in mind, that a lot of people are using the Raspi headless without any GUI just by SSH (and had removed all the GUI things). So please don’t call it old (or even worse: obsolete) as it is very important for a lot of users to control the Pi completely by SSH!
Thanks a lot ;-)
Stefan
Sorry, just noticed that this was already discussed here. Thank you for keeping the non-GUI-version of raspi-config!
thekan
Descargando.. pronto lo probare en mi rp2.. gracias por el gran trabajo realizado
[Mod translation: Downloading… soon I’ll try it on my rp2.. thank you for all the work done]
hiro345
Thank you for the OS update!
But I have a problem.
When I install NOOBS in Japanese, the desktop font breaks.
So, I install Japanese font as follows.
$ sudo apt-get install ttf-kochi-gothic xfonts-intl-japanese xfonts-intl-japanese-big xfonts-kaname
When I install NOOBS version 1.4.0, it was good without such a thing.
bfinio
Anywhere we can find more detailed notes about the Scratch update? I checked the forums and found this old thread resurrected recently, which mentions possible native GPIO support in Scratch – not clear from the blog post if that was included in this release or not:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=78382&start=200
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Scratch in this release includes a new GPIO server, which allows broadcast blocks to be used to set GPIO state and sensor blocks to be used to read GPIO state. I’ll have a look to see if this is documented in a useful fashion anywhere…
bfinio
That would be very helpful, thank you!
Aaron
Is the newest Raspbian Jessie version available from the Github link posted on the Kernel Building guide? I think it’s https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux.
Robert Newton
Windows 7 (native zip program) reports the zip file in PB (petabytes) when decompressed, and as a result won’t unzip for me. Luckily I also have 7Zip installed … that did the trick!
bfinio
I had the same problem – fyi there’s a forum thread going about it:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=121867
looks like the problem might be that the file is over 4GB which causes problems in Windows 7? (at least one person reported that it worked fine in Windows 10). Maybe an official fix/heads up about that in the blog post would be good, since I bet a lot of Windows users just use the built-in file explorer and not 7zip.
whheydt
With the I2C changes, will Jessie recognize an RTC out of the box and use it?
wallyware
Have the unpredictable SPI clock rates that occur with overclocking been resolved with this build?
Mike Redrobe
No mention of systemd ?
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
“There are modifications to the underlying system to improve performance and flexibility, particularly as regards the control of system processes…”
I could have called it systemd, but it wouldn’t have meant much to a lot of people!
FoTL
SystemD SystemV etcetera, despite all the fud most Debian Users seem not to be bothered and the ones who are bothered will know enough about Linux to change to another System?,
If it works does it really matter ???
jo
“Systemd” is incredibly good for RaspberryPi, in terms of boot time, see my article here: http://www.samplerbox.org/article/fastbootrpi : ~ 10 seconds boot time, instead of 25 before…
PhilE
I agree. I’ve been rebooting a lot recently, and the switch to Jessie made a huge difference.
Bob Irving
Just downloaded the zipped file of Raspian and when I tried to extract the img file, it said my Win7 computer needed about 743 Pb more space to do that. Hmm.
Any suggestions? Not sure what’s going on here, but I’m pretty sure the img file isn’t that large!
bfinio
See other comments above about the same issue, and this forum thread:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=121867
Long story short, download 7zip and use that instead:
http://www.7-zip.org/
FoTL
Read the responses prior to yours it has been mentioned twice with a link to the Forum Post..
Bob Irving
Woops. They actually got posted before mine was so weren’t available when I read the thread.
Robert Newton
Use another program like 7Zip. Evidently, Windows built in program doesn’t work so well with files so large. I had the same problem.
name
any reason we’ve not just gone with vanilla debian with a kernel image and raspi-* tools as separate packages?
whheydt
More or less the same reason that a “stock (race) car” doesn’t actually a “stock” engine right off the assembly line. Raspbian has been specially tuned to work with Pis.
FoTL
Debian ARMHF only supports ARMv7, the earlier RPi’s are ARMv6 so 2 images would have to becompiled.
Eben stated earlier in responses that an ARMv7 based Distro has negligible benefits over ARMv6 based Distro…
Ken Howe
Q4os is here too!
Will it be added to the third party distros on the raspberrypi.org website?
http://www.q4os.org/blog.html#news150928
Paul Titcombe
An official Raspberry distribution not properly supporting the official display (installing it upside down) is definitely unprofessional and does not make the foundation look good.
I know the solution is trivial but how many NOOBs is this going to confuse?
Richard Franklin
Have you fixed Epiphany so that it can properly play YouTube videos without showing the red play arrow button dead center in the screen while playing, and so that the YouTube controls are available while the video is playing, and so that all YouTube videos can be played?
The ability to play YouTube videos are one of the best ways to quickly learn about things (including thousands of Raspberry Pi related videos) and is a MUST have for the browser to be considered decent/usable. I am trying to replace my use of windows based machines to things Raspberry Pi, and the lack of browsers that properly play YouTube videos and don’t crash unexpectedly is one of the only things holding me back from full use of the RPi2’s on a daily basis. I have 6 of them so far and plan on getting more as time goes on.
I emailed the Foundation about this Epiphany problem a few months back and desperately plead for a response, but never got a reply. Hope you took it to heart.
FoTL
This is not a Epiphany Browser issue par-se, as IceWeasel has similar foibles.
Search the Forums for “kweb Minimal Kiosk Browser”, it seems the best workaround for Youtube and many other Video Sites, and the Developer is hoping to compile a Jessie version in the forseeable future..
Richard Franklin
Yes, I know Ice Weasel, Chromium, NetSurf, and every other browser has this problem or similar, or worse. I had to remove them all and just go back to Epiphany
Chromium is “evil” so I will not use it regardless of if and when it gets fixed. I would prefer to use the Raspberry Pi Foundation “official” browser that they have been working on improving. I already saw the Kweb “workaround”, and there are various, conflicting methods to use it and problems. I don’t like putting stuff on my machines that is marginal or klugey and has to be removed.
Let’s hope they figure it out for Epiphany. In the meantime, I am stuck having to listen to RPi tutorials on Windows machines, psi star psi. . . (could use my one nice x86 Ubuntu Linux box, which has Firefox and works great), but it is in my back office/lab room at work, not convenient for my desktop at home, where I do a lot of Pi’ing.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
We’re aware of the issues with video under Epiphany, and this is going to get some concentrated work over the next few months.
roemsi
Glad to hear that this issue with Epiphany and videos is in scope.
For the Epiphany it will be nice if there will be command line switches to start it in fullscreen kiosk mode, supress warnings, icognito mode, etc.
Cheers roemsi
Richard Franklin
Simon,
Glad to hear you are going to do some concentrated work on Ephiphany. Although anyone can make a long wish list of features, I will be happy if you can just get the YouTube part working ASAP as an update, since this is really a must for education now days. There is so much good educational stuff on YouTube, I love to show off the Pi2 capabilities and all the good stuff it runs. I use a 64GB class 10, 10, 3 microSDXc card (which makes the Pi2 run significantly faster standard Foundation NOOBS card). The only thing preventing it from full usage and replacement of my desktop machines for day to day use is the lack a YouTube support in the browser. Wish you the best and thanks for all you are doing for the RPi community.
Pi3 wish list- 32GB ram, >4GHz quadcore, at least 4, 16 bit (or better!) ADC/DAC channels, >1TB microSCXC+ card, faster bus to and from card. Better sound output resolution (current 11bit(?) is too low). All for less than $50!
iugamarian
For a year already I use youtube-dl for youtube and even other video sites. What I like most is that
youtube-dl downloads all the videos from a playlist in the current folder. Therefore when I want to watch a tutorial, in a browser I go to youtube user, Playlists, cursor over tutorial, Copy link location, open terminal, df -h to see if I have room (a video has about 100 MB to 200 MB), change directory to external drive, youtube-dl link.
I have hundreds of gigabytes of tutorials downloaded this way :D .
Robert Newton
Vim doesn’t seem to want to install. Disappointing. =(
Robert Newton
I guess it just took a long time. Weird. Anyway, it’s good now. =)
Chris Evans
Great work as usual:-)
Re Lite version
I suspect some people will want some features removed and other people would want them retained.
So can I suggest in addition to very stripped down version that there could be a utility that allowed users to select which extra’s they want deleted e.g. Libre, X, Desktop …
I realise that deleting from a full fat version is not as ideal from a technical point of view as selecting things to add, but I suspect that the community might be able to assist easier.
Ed Herbst
Any reason why new image does not appear to completely shut down? Power remains to video and network interface after system halted. Also no series of blinking lights which I always used as a signal it was safe to cut mains power.
Ed Herbst
A correction on my previous comment. It is only the “sudo halt” command that now fails to power down as it had in the past. Using “sudo halt -p” will power it off as does the shutdown command.
Steve Kennedy
Wow, it get’s better & better. On Saturday night I ordered a Raspberry Pi 2 and the Touch Display with Frame from the Shop’s Swag Store, expecting these to take 6 weeks to ship and so arrive around my birthday. They arrived this morning!
Took less than an hour to put the pieces together.
Visited the site to download Raspian now find a brand new version. My Birthday really has come early!
Looking forward to using Raspbian Jessie on the 7″ touch screen and driving my music through my HiFi using the IQaudIO Pi-DAC+ hat.
This is my third Raspberry Pi and with each generation, not only has the hardware speed increased, but also the delivery time.
Ship & deliver in just over one business day is astounding!
michael
I use Pis headless, using VNC to access a desktop. I have installed the new image on an A+ using a USB UART lead to power it and configure the WiFi dongle to a fixed address. This also gives me ssh access to a command line. I ran raspi-config with nothing special but when I tried to install tightvncserver I just got error messages about temporary failure resolving mirrordirector.raspbian.org. Sudo apt-get update failed with similar errors. Is the update not fully configured yet or something?
AndrewS
Simply sounds like your wifi dongle doesn’t have a working internet connection?
Richard Sierakowski
Really excellent work and a great step forward. Booting to GUI is the only sensible option.
Those that need a striped down version and command line access will have sufficient skills to prune and configure that requirement until the official minimal version is available.
Richard
Anthony
May I respectfully ask why sudo was such a big deal to people using RPi.GPIO? In what way is it more beginner friendly? I genuinely don’t know, and I’m not a Linux expert either. Cheers.
Winkleink
Not requiring sudo (root) access means the Run option in IDLE will not work when doing projects involving the GPIO pins.
Less confusing and one fewer things to take into account when teaching.
Also, every time you use sudo you risk your code doing things to the system that were not intended.
Adam
I think that Minecraft shouldn’t be included on the official image. For one, it makes a great baby’s first apt-get, and including it by default removes that. For two, lots of schools might prefer to not have it by default on the Pi. For three, it takes up room that a lot of users might want for other things.
FishX
MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! Why that there’s no Chinese Fonts?
Idris
I think booting to the GUI is a strange mood. When Ebon was first talking about the Raspberry pi he talked at length about how children today are disconnected from the underlying hardware and code of the machine. The fact that you had to StartX into the machine shows kids that there is something behind the fancy graphics. Even if 99 out of 100 kids just skip straight to the GUI there will always be that one that wants to know more. Isn’t finding that handfull of children the entire point? I do like to see the capabilities of the Pi Increased, I own 3 after all. But I just hope you guys aren’t forgetting the main points as to why you built the thing in the first place. Kid’s first, hobbyists last.
Leo Leibovici
hear hear! Much better expressed than my attempt earlier.
Bill Stephenson
Wow, more great news!!!
Thank you for the hard work, all of you. Love that you’re including Libre Office and Claws Mail and I’m really looking forward to checking out the UI upgrades, and the “Screenshot” app is just cool!!
Jim Manley
I, Maker of Wordlets such as Brainwidth, hereby annoint thee “Jessbian”!
Let the celebrations begin! Great job everyone!
;D
Max
The jessie zip link on this page appears to be damaged.
“i5-imac:Downloads max$ unzip ‘2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie(1).zip’
Archive: 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie(1).zip
warning [2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie(1).zip]: 76 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
(attempting to process anyway)
error [2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie(1).zip]: reported length of central directory is
-76 bytes too long (Atari STZip zipfile? J.H.Holm ZIPSPLIT 1.1
zipfile?). Compensating…
skipping: 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)
note: didn’t find end-of-central-dir signature at end of central dir.
(please check that you have transferred or created the zipfile in the
appropriate BINARY mode and that you have compiled UnZip properly)
”
Either it is a damaged zip or my zip is damaged but I have never gotten this error before and use unzip daily.
=^/
Max
ghp
It looks nice, but makes live for people setting up school environments more difficult.
I need to prepare 14 workplaces for kids, and burning SD cards now takes much more time.
Then, for each SD card to configure, I need to attach a keyboard and a mouse, where in good ol’ times a keyboard only was needed.
In wheezy, raspi-config started automatically. Great for administrators. Now I have to wait till desktop is up and start it from there. If you need to use this path 14 times you really start to dislike it.
The gui based config tool is really nice for end users, but a scriptable command line raspi-config tool (setup a config file with expand=yes;tz=german;keyboard=german;spi=on;boot=desktop;overclock=800 and go!) would help teachers much more to get repeatable results.
And when finally the cards are up and running, I remove all the xtra packages like minecraft and libreoffice and sonic which are not needed for the workshop. Which takes again time. For each SD card.
(People usually tell me: prepare a sd card and duplicate. Works if each and any of the card is identical. What you do not have in real live)
I agree that from an end user point of view it looks appealing. But please offer also a smaller, more manageable version for the admins.
Last not least, when in scratch I use the help menu, I get libreoffice started in edit mode for the help html. Not a good idea.
Texy
You can do the exercise once, make a backup of the SD card once you are happy, then clone it 13 times…….
Texy
ghp
I expected this comment. It works in few cases, but if the particular SD cards you have differ in sector number, you are lost and have to do it again completely manual for the affected cards. I ran into this multiple times, and decided this approach is too expensive. And: when file system is extended, cloning means that burning the sd card takes much longer.
Texy
The answer to that is not to do the file extending on the ‘master’ before you make the copyfile. Then you extend on each system and should work even if there is slight variation with the total free space on each card type. It doesn’t take long…………
Winkleink
Following on from ghp’s comment.
Do once. Re-image and then check out this guide from Les Pounder on writing to multiple SD cards at the same time.
http://bigl.es/staying-sane-your-guide-to-writing-multiple-raspberry-pi-sd-cards/
Andrew Mulholland
You may want to have a look at PiNet, would make that process quite a bit easier and is free and open source.
http://pinet.org.uk/
Andrew Oakley
Hi GHP. I wrote a how-to on shrinking SD card images for this exact purpose – making them smaller and thus quicker to copy to multiple cards for a classroom.
http://www.aoakley.com/articles/2015-10-09-resizing-sd-images.php
Vijay
Can I upgrade from Wheezy to Jessie directly? Without loosing my files and setting?
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
As described above, there is a Wheezy to Jessie upgrade path, but it is unsupported – there are a huge number of files changed between the two systems, and we have no way of knowing whether changes made by users to their own Raspbian install will clash with some part of the Jessie update. Have a look at the forum post linked above, and make sure you back up first if you try it.
Rustimator
Hi, just one question: If I don’t want to run into issues caused by an “unstable” upgrade path, does this mean I should keep my hands off apt-get update && apt-get upgrade for the time being. I operate 6 productive Pis in various setups (WordPress, Owncloud, Webcam, IoT devices) and really don’t want to go through the hassle of starting everything from scratch when I don’t have to.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
There won’t be a more stable upgrade path than that already given, but people in the community who try this may be able to suggest improvements and report problems (which is why it is a forum post rather than something carved in stone). If you need absolute stability, you’ll need to reinstall your software over the clean Jessie image.
Unfortunately, there are just too many files changed in an update from Wheezy to Jessie to be able to guarantee a problem-free update for every user.
Rustimator
Thanks Simon. If I understand you correctly, updating my Pi with sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade will automatically result in a Jessie update? So there is no further life for Wheezy – or will Wheezy continue to be maintained for a limited time in future?
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
apt-get will only upgrade to Jessie if you change the .list files as described in the instructions in the forum post linked above. If you leave them as Wheezy, they will still update any parts of Wheezy that come straight from the default Raspbian repo, but we won’t be issuing any more updates to the Wheezy image that we maintain.
Peter Green
If you want to upgrade to jessie you will need to change your apt sources. It won’t happen unexpectedly unless you have a very unusual apt setup.
Updates that can be automatically pulled from Debian will likely continue to get pulled from Debian until Debian stops making them available. However packages that have been modified either by the raspbian project or by the raspberry pi foundation are less likely to get updates.
John
PLEEEAAASE provide an official headless image with just the base system!!!
Stewart Watkiss
This all sounds great. It’s amazing to see how far Raspbian has come in just a few years.
The only negative thing I would say is that the size of the image is getting very big, but having all the additional software available more than makes up for that. Although it was easy enough to add software before using apt-get update if you have easy access to broadband that is not the case everywhere especially where Raspberry Pis are being used off-network (eg. in an after-school club or a youth club / Raspberry Jam).
The boot to command line made sense with the original aim which was predominately targetting teenagers, but these days we are teaching programming to much younger children. My 7 year old son was taking his first steps in Python recently. Booting to desktop removes one more barrier and makes it more user friendly.
For those that want to get back to the command line – it’s just a few clicks away.
Removing the requirement for sudo to access the GPIO is a big bonus, as that means code can be run directly from the editor (currently IDLE) without needing to get to the command line first.
One thing I would like to see in future is better support for switching between the RPi display and HDMI port and a way to easily configure HDMI and the Display to run side-by-side. That’s one thing I haven’t had time to look at yet since getting my displays so not sure how easy it is to do.
Yvan T.
“One thing I would like to see in future is better support for switching between the RPi display and HDMI port and a way to easily configure HDMI and the Display to run side-by-side”
It is not a thing i see possible/feasible in the near future as the video memory is shared with the OS. If you take memory for 2 displays it leaves only a small amount available to the OS, thus the performance will decrease. UNLESS there is another PI(3?) version coming/planned that would have a separate memory chunk for the video or doubled the total memory.
Stewart Watkiss
I think first priority is allowing switching between the two. Even when designing for a small screen it may be useful to temporarily switch to the standard HDMI (eg for a presentation or to develop on a larger screen).
“It is not a thing i see possible/feasible in the near future as the video memory is shared with the OS.”
I don’t know if it’s possible to actually extend the desktop across two displays, but it should be possible to run apps across two using 128MB of video memory.
I’ve not tried this myself, but the following is taken from the blog from when the display was released.
“Dual display usage
It is possible to use both display outputs at the same time, but it does require software to choose the right display. Omxplayer is one application that has been modified to enable secondary display output.”
pik33
Feature request: USB sound card as option in Raspi-Config instead of manual messing with /etc/something. After installing this on Pi2 with X200 card (C-media sound chip onboard) Sonic Pi doesn’t output sound via anything ald I will have to find once again these deep buried in /etc files to unblacklist (why is it blacklisted? o maybe it is not in the new version) and configure USB sound.
Feature request #2: Midnight Commander installed as default. This is of course easier (sudo apt-get install mc)
Milliways
The zip problem seems like a totally unnecessary problem. I finally managed to unzip and install the image. I have since installed a couple of packages, but df shows lots of unused space. It would seem sensible to make a <4GB image and allow users to expaand it (which they need to do anyway.
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 4031552 3248900 558140 86% /
devtmpfs 469756 0 469756 0% /dev
tmpfs 474060 0 474060 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 474060 6492 467568 2% /run
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 474060 0 474060 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1 57288 20232 37056 36% /boot
tmpfs 94812 0 94812 0% /run/user/1000
Federico Ramos
ARM NEON optimizations are supported out of the box right? (Require gcc-4.8)
Jeremy
The default compiler is now gcc 4.9.2
maximumentropy
There is no sign of a “new Raspberry Pi Configuration” in the preferences menu on my upgraded system, no clues in this post about what the command line might be to start it, and no hints about what package I might need to install using apt-get. Any tips?
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
“sudo apt-get install rc-gui” will install the Raspberry Pi Configuration GUI application.
maximumentropy
Thanks, but it’s not finding it. Is there a special repository that I need to configure to get the gui, or some other magic incantation that I need to perform?
entropy@raspberrypi:~$ sudo apt-get install rc-gui
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to locate package rc-gui
entropy@raspberrypi:~$
xyz
Did you `sudo apt-get update` first?
+realy its better to shoot trouble on the forum!
Peter Green
Did you perform step 2 from https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=121880 ?
2. Modify the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list – change “wheezy” to “jessie” in the first line and add “ ui” to the end of that line, so it reads “deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian jessie main ui”
Georg Bisseling
I very much appreciate this step because some of the software bugs in the programs coming with wheezy already bite me.
I own eight Raspberry Pis and have about a dozen different raspian installations on SD cards. There is a small cluster, a DNS server etc. Some hours of installation and configuration went into them. Backups done on an irregular basis.
Imagine my frustration when I hear that there is no supported upgrade path from wheezy to jessie.
After all being able to keep a system up-to-date without reinstallations is one of the most important Debian merits.
I am really disappointed.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Back them up and try the upgrade process. We are not officially supporting it for the simple reason that there are a huge number of changes between Wheezy and Jessie, and we have no way of testing it on every single customised Wheezy install out there.
The chances are that it will work in most cases, but we can’t possibly guarantee that it will work in all of them, as we don’t know what changes people have made to their systems.
If you try the upgrade path and it works, you’re where you want to be. If you try it and it doesn’t work, you will need to work out how to modify a Jessie image with your changes, but if you’ve taken a backup, you’ve not lost anything.
Vince Skahan
How do we disable the gui ‘before’ booting the system ? I already have to edit my config.txt file to set hdmi boost on anyway, is there a setting in there to control gui on/off as well ? (I’m away from the Pi so I can’t check)
I don’t want to need to get into a gui(ish) tool even via ssh to set the system up. I’d ‘much’ prefer being able to image the SD card, simply edit a txt file to set it on/off, stick it in the Pi, and boot.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
There’s no way to disable boot to GUI on first boot. If you really can’t face booting to GUI just once, then wait for the cutdown image that will be released in due course.
xyz
adding ‘root=/bin/sh’ to cmdline.txt kernel options
should disable the gui ;}
xyz
Or look hear
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=111144&p=82261
Leo Leibovici
Any idea of a time-scale for the cut down version Simon?
Nick
Won’t appending `systemd.unit=multi-user.target` to cmdline.txt do this?
Mikkel
Looking forward to the lite image for my compute module, but really would like still to have it to boot direct to GUI, will that be possible on the lite image?
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
I’m afraid not – the cut-down image won’t have X on it at all.
Rustimator
Ahh, that’s good news for all of those people running around headless – such as myself. It would be nice to leave out all those things I would consider optional: Mathematica, SonicPi, Java, Scratch, Minecraft, etc. – usually not necessary for IoT thingies.
Kind regards Chris
Mikkel
Will it it then be possible to install X on the lite image on compute module afterwards? Only the GUI not Office and all the other stuff…
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
I’d assume it should be possible to use apt to install X, but I’d guess you’ll then have quite a lot of configuration work to do to get a desktop environment set up. If you want the desktop but without all the apps, I’d suggest starting with the full image and using apt to remove the parts you don’t want, rather than trying to build back up to a desktop from the bare-bones image. Given that apt is used to install all the major applications, it should remove them reasonably cleanly.
Kratos
Awesome! It reboots SO fast! (I have the raspberry pi 2.)
smn
Recently I was fairly happy, that kodi has been added to the official repo. However it seems it got kicked again. No more kodi in raspbian?
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Kodi has never to my knowledge been included in the official Raspbian image; it’s a separate download. I don’t know if there is a Jessie version of Kodi in the repos, but if not, now that Jessie has been released, I would expect Kodi to be updated for Jessie in the not-too-distant future.
smn
Well maybe I’m mislead by the Kodi wiki, but actually I installed cody with the two lines described here on my old system recently:
http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_on_Raspberry_Pi#Raspbian
I’ve been surprised as well that it worked like this, as I used the repo of Michael Gorven before.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Those lines install Kodi from an external repository; it looks as if Kodi hasn’t yet been update for Jessie. I’d expect a Jessie version to be available fairly soon.
smn
Hm, we’ll see. Hopefully it will come…
But obviously I’m not the only one having that issue:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=240545&highlight=ppa+raspbian
Alan
Any chance of being able to get a bootsplash (i.e. Plymouth) working on Jessie? The change to systemd seems to be preventing it from loading
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
At some point I’d like to get a bootsplash working, but it’s not something I’ve looked at yet. I’d expect there to be one at some point, but it’ll depend on how far down the to-do list it is!
Alan Pullen
I can get it to kind of work but only get three dots and not the full theme – so far had to build initramfs, set plymouth theme and rebuild and add ‘splash quiet’ to cmdline.txt – doesn’t seem to make any diff if I load the init image in config.txt or not.
Danny
I installed qtcreator on Jessie according to https://wiki.qt.io/Apt-get_Qt4_on_the_Raspberry_Pi
when running qtcreator a received the following error:
—————————————————————————
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ /usr/bin/qtcreator
libEGL warning: DRI2: failed to authenticate
No tool chain set from kit “Desktop”.
No tool chain set from kit “Desktop”.
Unable to find an X11 visual which matches EGL config 125
Could not initialize OpenGL
Aborted
—————————————————————————
I had no problem on Wheezy. What have I done wrong?
Danny
BTW: qt designer runs OK.
Borleth
Chromium is not available in this new release Jessie. Is it normal?
FoTL
Yes, Debian stopped offering Chromium ARM version about 2 years ago.
In Raspbian Wheezy version 22 was stilled offered but it was out of date and buggy.
The forums have various workarounds to install a newer version 44, which is unsupported.
IMO IceWeasel (Firefox) is a good alternative to Epiphany Brower..
MOB
I need to have Chromium in order to have Flash so I can run and edit Scratch 2-projects. This works well in Raspbian Wheezy on Raspberry Pi 2. Is it possible to run and edit Scratch 2-projects in Raspbian Jessie?
AlexB
Can someone please point me in the direction of some sources for these new preferences utilities? OCD is not liking all these small inconsistent panels.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
apt-get source rc-gui will get the source for Raspberry Pi Configuration.
apt-get source alacarte will get the source for the menu editor.
apt-get source lxkeymap will get the source for the keyboard layout panel.
I’m interested to know which parts of the preferences panes you feel are inconsistent – making the UI more consistent has been my main goal since I started working on it a year ago.
AlexB
Thanks and if i come up with anything I’ll definitely share it on the forum
exartemarte
I’m a bit surprised at those complaining about updating all their Pi’s. You don’t have to. I have a Pi 2 for playing with on which I put the new version as soon as I read about it; and on a new project I will use whatever is the current version at the time. But I also have Pi’s running servers, an Internet radio, robots and other hardware projects. They are all running happily on earlier releases and I see no need to upgrade – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it …
Niall Saunders
@exartemarte:
Finally – some common sense.
Just because a new OS is available, this does not mean that all your previous versions will now stop working (even MicroSnot haven’t been that stupid – yet).
You only need to change to the new OS where you feel there might be a benefit – if there isn’t going to be one – don’t upgrade.
I have a huge number of PCs at home – all running various MS OSes. When Win10 came out, I bought a new i5 Dell laptop on eBay, pre-loaded with Win10. I tried it for a few weeks, hated it, ripped out Win10 and went back to Win7 Ultimate. Total cost? Nothing, I sold an older laptop for more than I paid for the new one!!
I will download Jessie (at some point – but not during the ‘roll-out frenzy’) and will give it a try. It certainly looks like a ‘keeper’ (by most accounts), but I certainly don’t have any need whatsoever to get a fancy GUI running on a headless weather station!!
My two cents, (assuming this can be easily done – and I am a total Linux novice, so I have no idea):
* Provide the normal ‘Jessie Full’ package for download
* Provide some form of interface (GUI, or otherwise) that can remove/reinstall packages from the distro to suit a users (lack of) needs
* Provide a basic ‘Jessie Lite’ distro that has all the ‘bling’ already removed (yet which can still be expanded using the previously described interface)
Cheers,
Niall
Pete Stevens
I have a minimal install of Jessie from Raspbian that I generated with debootstrap for hosting purposes. As I recall it’s around 200MB in size. I’ve never tried deploying it to an actual Pi locally – mine netboot but I might be persuaded to fix it up and drop it on the internet somewhere.
amin
WoW
finally i can install & run qt5 on my rpi without any problem easily.
sudo apt-get install qt5-default
sudo apt-get install qtcreator
sudo apt-get install build-essential g++ cmake
other thing i cant see webcam (guvcview) in wheezy !now in jessi my problem solved :) :\
sean007
Thank you Amin for drawing my attention to QT5, I just installed it as it looks interesting and useful.
NickMon
I followed the upgrade path and not the clean install as im all set up on HHD.
I notice that my apache2 webserver seems to not run right now.
Tried a remove and reinstall of apache2, but no page for example /var/www/index.html will come up in a browser…
Anyone else seen this ?
forca
has anyone tried to run LXCCU (homematic-ccu-image) on new release?
Pete Z
Might sound like a daft question, though how different is this official Jessie release from the ‘testing’ jessie?
I’ve been using the following for some time now.
deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi
rather than the wheezy repository.
#deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ wheezy main contrib non-free rpi
Cheers.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
The underlying Jessie system is the same; what is different is the additional applications we add, plus tweaks to the desktop user interface, new configuration panels, new plugins for the menu bar etc.
Simon Blake
I can’t seem to get SFTP access to a newly-minted Pi running Jessie. SSH seems to work fine, but attempting to start an SFTP session, I’m told the folder I’m trying to access (whether I try / or /home/pi) doesn’t exist (whereas it clearly does).
Am I doing something wrong?
James Hughes
Please post tech questions on the forum – you are more likely to get an answer!
Alex Ellis
Looking forward to trying this out – I hope the UI is quicker/more responsive in this update. Which version of Java have you packaged? Is it the Oracle version or the OpenJDK? Thanks.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Oracle
Herman B.
Congrats for the good work. The new version of Raspbian looks fantastic, although I’ve encountered a problem with the new “Keyboard Setting Dialog”. I’m used to work with a Belgian Azerty-keyboard, so I’ve tried to select that in the new KSD and than to reboot, but the UK-settings were coming back. So I had to use the old “raspi-config” in order to get the keyboard of my liking.
Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author
Thanks for pointing out the keyboard problem – I’ve seen occasional reports of this but have struggled to reproduce it here. Looks as if for some reason the command that reloads the saved keyboard settings isn’t always being run at desktop startup – I’ve found a more robust way to get this to happen, which we’ll push out with the next update.
Ton van Overbeek
Also had a similar problem. Used the rc_gui to change to US International keyboard. Worked fine on the desktop. Reconfigured to boot to the command line. UK keyboard was back. Ran commandline version of raspi-config and then both CLI and desktop has the right keyboard.
Randy
I also had this problem – setup my K120 keyboard for US english using the GUI and all looked ok, but when I rebooted, I got the GB version back – so my hash symbols became pound symbols among other funny substitutions…
Michael Bruyninckx
It would be very helpful if a future release would contain one of the free and open source and very powerfull HTML/CSS/JavaScript text editors like Adobe Brackets.io or GitHub Atom.io – the latter even does Python with the right plugins.
With stuff like NodeJS, which works fine on the RPI, a good web technologies text editor is still missing.
Imagine teachers teaching web development, and students only need a RPI for all.
Ismael Martínez
Thank you for the “boot to desktop” move.
I’m a GNU/Linux user but I prefer launch CLI from desktop that desktop from CLI. Average user I think prefer this too. And those who blame the change are those who knows how to revert it.
Again, thanks for this and for your work.
Jarle Teigland
I’m a bit disappointed that Jessie won’t fit on my old 64Mb Nokia SD card ?!? I mean progress ?!?? Dooooooohhhhhh
?
Jarle Teigland
But on a serious note I am looking forward to deploy Jessie on my Pi’s ; any restrictions on older models ; A / B ?? ‘Sudo-less’ GPIO is great, does that imply IDLE / Python runs ‘sudo-less’ ??
John Jeffers
So far I have not seen the result of moving files from the old card /home directory to the new fresh Jessie /home directory. And which way works best. It doesn’t work naturally with Win7. I presume one should mount the old card as a flash drive? The problem is there is a Fat volume and a linux volume.
Martyn
Good work, but can we have a version that fits on a 4gb card please as we can’t afford to upgrade all our Pi SD cards. Perhaps giving the option in Noobs of not installing certain components might help here.
Kari
This is important point. Many institutions and individuals who uses Raspberry Pis have lot of 4Gb SD cards. Now those are getting obsolete just because of bloated operating system install. Let people themself choose what they need. Is Minecraft really so important for education?
Ovi Horvat
sudo KUDOS raspberrypi-team
great work, but definitely need CLI only as Jessie-Lite version. Mostly all of us are using RPis for projects that don’t need a GUI. At least I’m using all my RPis for robotics, electronics and home automation projects. Barely I’m using the desktop (if so it’s python and scratch that will run).
keep us posted and keep up the good work. Nicely done!
Ovi Horvat
Not finished to praise RPi team and I’m running into lots of problems with the new girl in town, Jessie. after trying the Claw email software several times, I gave up. Then on reboot my RPi doesn’t recognize my passwrd. Actually, it does but it loops back to the login screen! Now I’m stuck!
willy
have u faound a solution? i am at the same boat…of course i cant reisntall the jessie but i thing its lame..(sory my english)
Fester Bestertester
OK. Model B, 512k (My faithful first, still chugging along). Those with Pi 2’s may have other experiences, but here’s my saga.
Virgin Jessie in 8GB card. Edited /boot/config.txt for 720p HDMI screen (a TV). Boots fine. GUI Config tool does its stuff just like Wheezy’s raspi-config. Fine so far.
First I added the Desktop Pager to the Panel. Uh-oh… right-click on it to add more desktops, and what do I find? it’s greyed-out. What’s the story here?? From here on, all done in a jumble on one desktop…
Menu > Preferences > Main Menu Editor:
A welcome and long-awaited item, _BUT_ Am I doing something wrong here, or is it just plain useless??
Items installed from repository by sudo apt-get install (I’ve got a list of stuff I run in Wheezy – Ham Radio, file-sharing, Mozilla browser and emailer), do not list as installable in Application Launch Bar Settings.
Synaptic Package Manager _again_ appears in Main Menu under Preferences.
I’d like to be able to Cut it from there and Paste it to appear under System Tools (I feel that’s where it better belongs).
To do this, I created a new item under System Tools, with the same details as the original, and clicked OK (though in the process I found no means of associating an Icon!)
This should have created an item in the Main Menu (with perhaps a default icon?), but NO! Nothing shows.
Likewise, no way to just copy mc for a sudo version, and hand-made doesn’t show up.
Does this Menu Editor have superuser ‘sudo’ rights? It should, by default! and possibly thus also belongs better under System Tools).
Summary: I’m glad I’ve still got a working Wheezy card. :(
Fester Bestertester
A bit deeper:
Mozilla stuff?
Iceweasel (to replace “Web”(Epiphany) in the Panel) is a bit more resource-hungry, but _vastly_more usable! When Epiphany *finally* gets a decent Homepage facility, and some pop-ups on hover over cryptic clunky symbols, I may re-evaluate.
Icedove is similarly eminently usable. I don’t even know if there’s another emailer – I went straight for this for ease of transition (having to use this instead of my whiz-bang hp desktop with Kubuntu and Thunderbird).
Thunar instead of pcmanfm too…
Then trying to build xastir – a breeze in Wheezy, but errors galore in Jessie. There’s an email reflector for that, so I’ll likely get it sorted there.
Picky sod, ain’t I? :)
Randy
what is the program taking care of the wifi and ethernet management? On the GUI, in parenthesis, is says (dhcpcdui)…
what happened to wicd and the older one? In fact I was a using a wheezy -> jessie version not long ago and it was using wicd… where are it’s conf files? Can I access it via the cli?
MOB
Raspian Jessie works very well, but I had to install obconf (OpenBox Configuration Manager) to have two desktops to switch between.
I now use the latest Chromium from Ubuntu 15.04 with Flash 12.0, so I can run and edit Scratch 2 projects and listen to Spotify.
Fester Bestertester
obconf – what a blessing! Thanks! Just one ‘fly in the ointment’: Dialogue windows won’t re-size to show all the buttons. This with 720p screen. Thankfully the extra desktop(s) remain when the dialogue is closed. :) This is a systemic fail! :(
MOB
Have you tried Alt+left mouse button in the middle of a dialog box to drag it so you can see all buttons.
Fester Bestertester
One of the tricks of the cognoscenti – thanks! …but shouldn’t be necessary – dragging an edge or corner should work; why not??
MOB
When you choose some menu items (e.g. Get more scenarios) in Greenfoot Java IDE they originally open LibreOffice Writer instead of a web-browser, but after I installed Chromium this opens. The best would be if a web-browser that can run Java applets opened. Epiphany and Iceweasel can run Java applets (if you install icedtea-plugin), but none of the scenarios worked due to some runtime exception.
Mike
When will Scratch 2 be available?
Ben Nuttall
Scratch 2 runs in the browser using Flash. A poor decision meaning most modern devices can’t use it. We stuck with Scratch 1.4 and put a lot of work into optimising it to run well on the Pi, as well as adding GPIO support natively.
Herman B.
Why not use Snap! 4.0 (http://snap.berkeley.edu/) instead of Scratch 2.0? It also runs in the browser but it is based on Javascript instead of Flash. It is derived from Scratch but it enables to build more complex programming structures (but I don’t know if someone is working on a version adapted to the RBP yet — e.g. use of GPIO?).
MOB
Snap seems to be very buggy. One can convert Scratch 1.4 projects to Snap by opening them in BYOB (for Raspberry Pi) and then saving, and then importing the ypr-file in Snap running in Iceweasel. The program I tested with didn’t run well in Snap, but did run in BYOB.
There is an HTML5 editor and a player for Scratch 2. It works better in Iceweasel without Flash, but is also buggy.
http://nathan.github.io/pixie/
http://phosphorus.github.io
Anonymous
When extracting the zip file I got, I get this:
“Archive: 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip
warning [2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip]: 76 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
(attempting to process anyway)
error [2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip]: reported length of central directory is
-76 bytes too long (Atari STZip zipfile? J.H.Holm ZIPSPLIT 1.1
zipfile?). Compensating…
skipping: 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)
note: didn’t find end-of-central-dir signature at end of central dir.
(please check that you have transferred or created the zipfile in the
appropriate BINARY mode and that you have compiled UnZip properly)
”
I checked that the SHA-1 sum was correct and it was… What do I do?
crumble
Use the latest version of 7zip.
Older versions fail as well. If you have configure your temp folders into a fast but small device, check if it can handle 5GB. If it is smaller, configure 7zip to use the local folder and not temp.
someone
not fully compatible for realvnc server yet (especially for make vnc works on boot). hope it will work soon.
then, there is problem with pi2, just need 2 days before i cant connect to my pi with ssh nor vnc. anyone have idea?
Jarle Teigland
In regards to VNC – did a tightvnc install on Jessie first ; installed OK but could not connect !! Did a complete uninstall of tVNC – then used Simon Walters excellent xVNC install – works like a dream on both Model 2 and B+ , link to install below. Very well done to everyone at the foundation on a very successful Distro Rollout – Jessie is the new sheriff in town ;0)
http://simplesi.net/auto-install-x11vnc/
Brian Gilhuly
Real VNC works fine; loads at boot and runs in virtual mode. It took me a few minutes to figure out the new config system, but there are good instructions on how to use it here: https://support.realvnc.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/495/5/how-do-i-use-init-scripts-with-linux-distributions-that-prefer-systemd
Huckleberry Friend
Great job! Just trying it out after using the new GUI to configure it. I am using as I type and think it looks great. Looking forward to getting under the hood and really checking this thing out. Keep up the good work.
Polski Ogorki
Kudos to the Pi Towers team. I’m very grateful for all the hard work to “round out” all the rough edges of the end-user experience. It means a lot. There are so many other Single Board Computers (SBC’s) out there, where none of this “rounding out” is being done (by all the desktop tweaks, and the creation of useful, pre-included GUI utilities).
A much larger portion of this “rounding out” gets outsourced to the end user (by these competitors to the Pi), which seriously makes those other SBCs **not worth buying**, even if you are a highly-skilled user (since if you are highly-skilled, your time is worth so much money, that it eclipses the purchase value of the “non-rounded out” SBCs, **when you put a dollar value on your time in applying those tweaks**). Time is money, so they say.
The value of a GUI raspi-config is absolutely huge, IMHO, when you stop to appreciate all the noobs **who have a reflexive aversion command lines**, as well as the highly-skilled users out there, who’s time is worth a lot of money (and would appreciate not having to read forum postings and documentation, etc, just to learn about the existence of utilities like raspi-config, but rather can just visually browse through the desktop’s menus in the upper left corner, which is the logical first place to look).
Please keep up the good work! I look forward to the watershed day when Youtube works well in a good web browser (like Midori or Ice Weasel), *included in stock Raspbian*.
Fester Bestertester
More Jessie issues
Install obconf and set for 4 desktops (all needed here!) and nothing shows. For usability, surely on setting more than one Desktop there should be a Pager show automatically in the Panel? I manually installed and put mine between System Tray and dhcpcd, bracketed by spacers. Looks good and works well…
Hopefully helpfully…
MrB
I’ve just bought a classroom set of Sense HATs and noted that these are now supported under Scratch with Jessie. Is there any documentation for this support?
Clive Beale
Well spotted! :) More details in today’s blog (give it a couple of hours, work in progress….)
coding
Hey Raspberry developers,
I hope you’re still reading this thread.
I installed Jessie and I must say there are some drawbacks:
– Menus have no borders, they are just a white solid rectangle
– Some check boxes are not visible! No cross inside, just a slightly different shadow. I’m having a very hard time to know if they are checked or not.
– The default Web browser’s scroll bar is 1 pixel off the right side of the screen! Very hard to hit the scrollbar with your mouse cursor. Other default apps’ scrollbars like the file manager’s are properly aligned.
– My Pi 2 boots much longer into the desktop than when on Wheezy! Sometimes theres just a black screen and nothing happens until I switch between text consoles.
Hope you can fix this soon! I have no choice but to go back to Wheezy or try other distributions. Jessy is not usable on an every-day basis with those bugs!
Best wishes
Alan
What I have been most impressed by so far in the latest release is the stability. In the past the web browsers used to conk out under load. Now they seem to be rock steady. Fingers crossed. The apparent improvement in performance (in the gui) also much appreciated.
There was an opinion piece on the internet along the lines of “Has the Raspberry Pi lost its way?΅ What rubbish.
John
When will the raspbian jessie lite image be available?
Can you tell us an aprox. release date?
Thanks in advance!
Rainer
This is not the “official” jessie lite image, but my way to reduce the size of roundabout 3,2MB to 0,9MB (with the target to have a server with gcc, python, perl and standard-utils).
apt-get has to be run as root or with sudo:
> apt-get purge –auto-remove epiphany-.* scratch* sonic-pi libreoffice* claws-mail greenfoot bluej alacarte lxkeymap scrot wolfram-engine pypy*
> apt-get purge –auto-remove x11-.*
> apt-get purge –auto-remove lxde raspberrypi-artwork xkb-data omxplayer gstreamer1.0 penguinspuzzle sgml-base xml-core alsa-.* fonts-.* desktop-* gnome-.*
> apt-get purge –auto-remove debian-reference-en xdg-utils menu-xdg xdg-user-dirs libraspberrypi-dev libraspberrypi-doc tasksel fakeroot
> apt-get purge –auto-remove java-common g++-4.9 gdb dbus
> apt-get purge –auto-remove liblapack3 libblas3 shared-mime-info python-picamera python-pifacecommon python3-picamera python3-pifacecommon
> apt-get install deborphan
> apt-get remove –purge $(deborphan)
> apt-get autoremove –purge
> apt-get clean
> apt-get autoclean
Adam
Why did you break it?
Clive Beale
Pour faire d’omelette
Keen
Hey quick question, when I go to unzip the file, it tells me I need an additional 734PB … that seems to be very incorrect to me and I cant seem to find any info on this. Would you recommend a redownload of the zip file containing the image? Or what else could cause this?
Adarsha
Any updates on lite version with only Headless mode?
Barry
Hi
This all sounds great but having invested many hours getting my ‘main’ Pi working the way I want it to, it appears that to benefit from Jessie I have to start all over again.
Barry
Having made my little moan I bit the bullet and started afresh with Jessie. Glad I did. This is a major, major improvement in Raspbian usability. Love it!
Rolf
The Jessie image works really smooth, quick boot, responsive etc.
When can we download the lite version?
Gogo
Hi! At the current state SuperCollider is not working; I wonder where I could report that issue (ERROR: Message ‘atIdentityHash’ not understood.)
akopac
Does Raspbian Jessie’s Kernel support AX.25?
SawaX
Yeaaah! I did it! I matched Jessie to 4GB SD card, finally! It will be the best solution for PiHole and OwnCloud ;)
David Denker
I now have Jessie and I can not get my python program to auto start at boot up using the terminal. It is a program that runs 24-7 and I must be able to auto run it when ever my PI boots! I have only been able to get it to run in the background and it soon dies. (not sure why!) Also no keyboard input. Tried to bring to the foreground with “fg” but it does not see it! This worked great with the old version!! (but I do not want to stay in the past) Not happy!
Dmitri Djakov
The same problem. Background python script dies approx. after 3 hours of working without any errors in log. Very strange problem. The only solution at the moment is downgrade.
Anon
Thanks – very nice! :)
One wish though: could you please (by default or via raspi-config, maybe in a “tweaks” section) add the power saving fixes for the Edimax EW-7811Un Wireless adapter to the official Raspbian image? After quite a while of coping with WiFi drop-outs and slowness, I found and tried the suggestions at https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=61665#p458761 (and various other sites) and finally do have stable WiFi (so far) – what a nice experience when you’re SSHing into your Raspi(es) and they actually *are there* on the network …
Since this adapter is quite common for use with the Pi (as far as I know), it would be very nice (and important in my humble opinion) to have this fixed by default in order to have a pleasant out-of-the-box experience with regard to remotely accessing the Pi – both for beginners (who can use their time for other things than fixing the WiFi) and advanced users (who don’t need to apply the fix (completely) manually every time when setting up a Pi).
Om Vaghela
I have raspberrypi b+ model and I have downloaded Jessie version from raspberry.org
now problem is that if I enter sudo apt-get update command then it shows this..
Hit http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie InRelease
Hit http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/main Sources
Hit http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/ui Sources
Hit http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/main armhf Packages
Hit http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/ui armhf Packages
Ign http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/main Translation-en_GB
Ign http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/main Translation-en
Ign http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/ui Translation-en_GB
Ign http://archive.raspberrypi.org jessie/ui Translation-en
100% [Waiting for headers]
and then it stops working if I try again without reboot it shows error like this..
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock – open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
Can anyone please help me?
Annoyed
I now no longer have ethernet connection, I am really lost with this has anyone any idea, I have a very customized system that took me months to build, the OS is located on my external HD, I have full webserver set up, MQTT broker, custom Grove Pi system, mongo db, many on boot scripts, nothing will work now, I am worried I have just messed up nearly 3 months of work, can’t find any solutions online can anyone help.
apjoshi
Well done Mr.Simon Long. This time you got it all right with the updates.
Tor
Hi guys
Just noticed that my bluetooth dongle can’t connect to any of my devices while using Rasbian Jessie. Or more like it connects for a very short period and then disconnects immediately. Same dongle and devices works great with Wheezy, got no clue what’s wrong. All help appreciated.
Here is the dongle http://thepihut.com/products/nano-usb-to-bluetooth-dongle-v2-0
Best regards
Tor
Kim
Ok it’s been over 1 month and I can’t seem to find the promised official lite/headless image. Where is it?
jacob ritorto
Shoot, I just nuked my nice wheezy distro because it was getting old and I wanted jessie. Now I can’t write it to my 4gb card, I’ve lost all my old stuff and even if it had worked, I’d not be able to log in because I don’t have a tv for it. This kills. I guess no Pi for me until the lite image comes out. And also, please do something about the weird zipfile format you’re distributing in. Regular unix unzip can’t read it.
People who are using these things for real education and development don’t have time for this bloat and GUI silliness – you’re moving tragically and directly away from the beauty of this machine with this coddling and bloat.
jacob ritorto
Welp, despite the frustration, I really wanted to run Jessie on my 1B. I decided to go for it and hack the image to do what I needed. Turns out you can shrink it to fit on a 4GB SD if you’re persistent. I downloaded the image onto an ubuntu pc and used losetup -P loop0 to loopback-mount it. Then I mounted loop0p2 on /mnt and cd’ed there. I used tar with the -P argument to preserve symlinks with hardcoded / in them to create a tarball of just the unix partition of the distro on my hard drive. Unmount the filesystem from /mnt, but leave the loopback mount alone. Run gparted and delete partition 2 (unix ext4 fs), then re-create it smaller – small enough to fit your device. I think I knocked 300MB off the four-thousand-something original value to make it fit on mine and your SD card will probably vary, so do the math and figure out what will fit. Once that’s all done, unmount everything (filesystem mounts as well as loopback mounts – you can dismount all loopback mounts with losetup -D). Now it’s time to write this modified and mostly blank image to the actual sdcard. (Note: I did try to rewrite the tarball to the image file before imaging the whole shebang to the sdcard, but it corrupted the filesystem outrageously, so that comes later in this recipe.) To write it: dd if= of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=3039
Note: you will easily destroy your hard drive with dd if you’re not sure about what you’re doing, so read up if you need to, then check and double check your device names, typing, etc before punching it. My sdcard was a total of 3840 1M blocks, so I cut a meg off for superstition.
Once the card’s written, mount it with mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt and cd in there. Untar that tarball you made earlier of the original distro using the -P arg to tar again to be sure you recreate the /-containing filenames. Took like fifteen minutes on my mom’s sh*tty old PC laptop. cd out and sync a few times for luck. Unmount everything. Yank out the sdcard. You’re now ready to plug it in to your pi and pray. Remember to expand the fs to fill your sdcard using raspi-config at some point. Oh, and don’t forget to shut off the @#$%$ X11 default startup while you’re in there. Have fun. Find me on facebook or something if you get hemmed up in any of this and I’ll try to help. Jah love.
–jake
Nathan
So does this new update not allow log in verifications? When I plug in my pi it goes straight to X
John
Can you please give us any news about the lite image?
I think we don’t have the same interpretation of the word soon.
Vanfanel
Any news on the lite image would be great.
This default Jessie image is bloated for many of us.
Cyberganny
Hi,
could you please name a date, when you will provide the “Little Image” for headless use? So many people use the Pi in headless mode and its much more handy and secure to maintain an small image instead of the big one. Please give us an estimated availability date.
Thanks in advance
Nioc
Hello, does the Jessie lite version is available?
I found this, but I don’t know if it is stable or not :
https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/images/
noonewillwait
You don’t have to wait longer: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian
Jived
Hi All !
Think i am off topic but honestly I don’t really know where to start asking for help… I am tasked with a project (training environment) to create a virtual reality cycling system, (btw i am from RSA),I need to create a video player that uses python variables(Speedometer) to vary the video player rate. It’s day 3 currently and I haven’t been able to achieve this. I’m trying to use netbeaans 8.1, jdk1.8.0_65, on both raspi and laptop, and have followed almost every tutorial without success, please can a kind individual assist me in this, nothing seems to be working at this point. The sample javaFX apps do not even run on my Pi at this point. The video player has to get a speed reference from the speedometer to adjust the rate of play and the video player needs to send a duration function so the hardware can adjust the output(pwm) to terrain changes stored in a .csv file. I apologise for any lack of intelligence or errors made at this point im running on $ hours sleep since Thursday morning 4am (btw its Monday 19:53).Any help is appreciated. My email address is [email protected]
pacaut
bonjour
je viens de telecharger raspbian jessie lite mais le systeme me demande un login et un mot de passe que je ne connais pas
merci de me renseigner
sean007
I have several research papers to edit I was considering using LaTex. Is this the best option or is there a more recent and better alternative available to use with Jessie?
Abdelkarim Mateos
Hi.
After try update fro Wheezy, fails. Backuped my SD CArd, and try a fresh install of Raspbian Jessie. Too many issues with apt.get packages. Not cmake, can’t compiling cmake for multiple issues, can’t install postfix, ntpdate… Try download cmake form raspberrypi repos, but not work. Too many headaches.
Benke C
I have enjoyed Raspbian until Jessie arrived. Since I run my Raspberries headless I have to stick to Wheezy until it stops working. I am sorry to say I have to leave Raspbian and find some other os for my Pies. Raspberry is not a normal computer and that’s it’s great advantage. With a couple of Pies in my house I can not run around with keyboard and monitor whenever I need to do something in my Pies.
pit_w
Jessie auf raspi mit 64GB-Karte installiert,
auto pi-login deaktiviert,
pi-passwort geändert,
aber:
kann mich nicht als root einloggen
weder mit pw raspberry noch raspberrz noch root nch möglich.
Was tun?
pit_w
Gelöst!
Als pi@raspberrypi:
sudo passwd root
neues Passwort vergeben,
o.k.
Danke
Devil78
is /etc/modules loaded at boot? I need to load a driver but i must type sudo modprobe mk_arcade_joystick_rpi map=1,2
to load this driver in Retropie 3.4 based on Rasbian Jessie.
Suggestions? Thanks!
Roshan More
I want to display particular web page on my epiphany browser after raspberry startup,
Please help me,
Thanks in advance.
Ben Nuttall
Try the forums
ReneM
Today I installed this for my raspberry pi.
Mounting my nas was not posible.
searching for hours I found a solution, from 2012. (over 4 years ago this problem seem to exist.)
Maybe it might be a good idea to get the basics working first ??? Before all kind of fancy stuff on an image, from which the basic needs are not working ?
Please ?
by bob_binz » Sun Jul 22, 2012 8:02 pm
chrisw2 wrote:
I know this isn’t going to help either of you but nfs-kernel-server just works for me. I installed it & nfs-common, edited /etc/exports & did /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart, exports mount ok on other machines, same after RPI is rebooted. Just works, no messing with service levels or trying to change stating of services.
To be honest, it’s worked for me on all Raspbians I’ve used so far. Just changed to the Official release, (and done a few bits and pieces, such as build XBMC) then when I’ve come to install the nfs components, I noticed the messages. It works, but I have to start rpcbind manually. Still head scratching atm.
EDIT: ok, a little drastic perhaps, but an apt-get purge on nfs-common and rpcbind followed by re-install did the trick. Obviously something screwy happened somewhere. All working expectedly now.
kn6ju
Something odd…….
Before I updated my new RPI2B the terminal and Browser works with a HDMI/ VGA adaptor, but not with the RPI2B LCD.
I just updated my RPI2B to interface with the RPI LCD.
Now that parts works….but now the Browser no longer responds…???
Did some setting get changed..??
LW
ACjordy
i don’t know how but if i install raspbian jessie on micro SD(sandisk) and write it succesfully.
it doen not work when i put it in my raspbeey pi 2
however is i write raspbian wheezy on it (version that i had on my pc) then it DOES WORK
WHAT AM I DOING WRONG!! PLZ HELP
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