Schlagwort: stretch

  • A new Raspbian update: multimedia, Python and more

    A new Raspbian update: multimedia, Python and more

    Reading Time: 7 minutes

    Today we’re releasing a new update for Raspbian, including a multimedia player, updated Thonny, and more. Here’s Simon with everything you need to know.

    Updating Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi || Raspberry Pi Foundation

    How to update to the latest version of Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi.

    VLC Media Player

    When I first joined Raspberry Pi, back in the dim and distant past (in reality 2014, but it does seem a long time ago now…), and I started looking at Raspbian, I made a list of the additional features and applications that I thought it needed to be a “complete” modern desktop operating system. Over the years, we’ve managed to tick off most of the items on that list, but one glaring omission has been nagging at me all this time: a decent media player. Windows has Windows Media Player; MacOS has QuickTime Player and iTunes; but we’ve had a big hole where something similar ought to be for Raspbian. It’s been a common request on the forums, and while we’ve had bits and pieces that do some of the job, like the command line OMXPlayer application, we really wanted a nice GUI-based media player.

    VLC is one of those programs that “just works” for media playback; it is cross-platform, it has a nice interface, and it plays back pretty much anything you throw at it. It was the player I really wanted to use in Raspbian — but it was unable to access VideoCore’s video decoding hardware, and the software video codecs in VLC were too slow to be anything more than irritating when running on Raspberry Pi, so it really wasn’t worth shipping it. Until now.

    After a lot of work (by people far cleverer than me), we are now able to announce that Raspbian includes a fully hardware-accelerated version of VLC. It plays most audio file formats; it uses software codecs for many video formats, and it uses VideoCore’s video engine to accelerate playback of H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1 video. (Note that you will need to buy additional codec licences for MPEG and VC-1; if you’ve already bought a licence to enable hardware acceleration in OMXPlayer and Kodi, this licence will also enable these codecs for VLC.)

    Raspbian update screenshot

    This is still a work in progress — we’ve got most of the major bugs out, but there will most likely be the odd glitch, and you’ll probably find that Pi Zero and Pi 1 will still struggle with some content. But once you’ve updated your Pi, you should find that double-clicking on a video file will open it in VLC and play it back with decent quality.

    Thonny 3

    A couple of years ago, as part of the list of additional features mentioned above, we looked for a nicer Python development environment than IDLE, and we found Thonny — a really elegant combination of a user-friendly IDE with features that are also useful to expert developers. It’s been our standard IDE shipped with Raspbian ever since, and Aivar Annamaa, the developer, has been very responsive to our feedback and requests for new features.

    He’s recently released version 3 of Thonny, and this is now the version in Raspbian. Version 3 offers a lot of useful new debugging features, such as breakpoints and an Assistant feature that analyses your code to find bugs that Python’s syntax checker misses. There is a lot more information about Thonny 3 on Aivar’s website — it’s well worth a read.

    Raspbian update screenshot

    We’ve also made one user interface change this time. We’ve always offered the choice between running Thonny in its regular mode, and a cut-down “simple” mode for beginners, which removes the menus and gives a fixed screen layout. Up until now, switching between the two has happened via different entries in the main Raspberry Pi menu, but that was a bit clumsy. In the new version, simple mode is the default, and you can switch Thonny into regular mode by clicking the link in the top right-hand corner of the window; if you want to switch back to simple mode, select it on the General tab of the Thonny options dialogue, which is available in the Tools menu. (Thonny will always start in the last mode you selected.)

    Desktop configuration

    One of the other changes we’ve made this time is one that hopefully most people won’t notice!

    The configuration of the Raspberry Pi desktop has always been a bit of a mess. Due to the fact that the underlying LXDE desktop environment is made up of a bunch of different programs all running together, trying to set up something like the system font or the highlight colour involves making changes to several configuration files at once. This is why pretty much the first thing I did was to write the Appearance Settings application to try to make this easier than digging around in multiple config files.

    Linux desktop applications are supposed to have a global configuration file (usually in the directory /etc/xdg/) that takes effect unless overridden by a local configuration file (in the hidden .config subdirectory of the user’s home directory). Unfortunately, not all the desktop components adhered to this specification. As a result, getting the Appearance Settings application to work involved quite a bit of kludging things about under the hood, and one of these kludges was to always keep a local copy of each of the configuration files and to ignore the global versions.

    This worked, but it had the undesirable side effect that any time we wanted to update the appearance of the desktop, we had to delete all the local configuration files so they could be replaced by the new ones, and this meant that any changes the user had made to the configuration were lost. This was quite annoying for many people, so with this release, we’ve tried to stop doing that!

    Most of the desktop components have now been modified so that they correctly read the global configuration files, and for future releases, we are going to try to just modify the global versions of these files and not touch the local ones. If we update the configuration, you will see a message informing you that this has happened, but your local files will be left unchanged. To make sure you get the latest configuration, launch Appearance Settings and choose one of the buttons on the “Defaults” tab; doing this will set your desktop to our currently recommended defaults. But if you want to stick with what you’ve already got, just don’t do that! You can even try the new defaults out: press one of the defaults buttons, and if you don’t like the results, just hit Cancel, and your previous configuration will be restored.

    Raspbian update screenshot

    One final point on this: in order to get this all to work properly in future, we have had to delete a few local files on this occasion. These are files that most people will never have modified anyway, so this will hopefully not present any problems. But just in case, they have been backed up in the oldconffiles subdirectory of the user’s home directory.

    Multiple images

    When I first started working on Raspbian, the desktop image file was just under 1GB in size. This has gradually crept up over the years, and now it’s around 1.75GB. While downloading a file of this size isn’t a significant problem for someone with fibre broadband, many people are on slower connections where such large downloads can take hours.

    In order to try and address this, for all future releases we will now release two separate images. The default Raspbian release is now a minimal install — it gives you the desktop, the Chromium browser, the VLC media player, Python, and some accessory programs. Running alongside this is the “Raspbian Full” image, which also includes all our recommended programs: LibreOffice, Scratch, SonicPi, Thonny, Mathematica, and various others.

    The Recommended Software program that we launched in the last release can be used to install or uninstall any of the additional programs that are in the full image; if you download the minimal image and check all the options in Recommended Software, you will end up with the full image, and vice versa.

    Raspbian update screenshot

    Hopefully, this means that downloading Raspbian will be easier for people on slower connections, and that you can easily add just the programs you want. The full image is provided for everyone who wants to get everything in one go, or who won’t have access to the internet to download additional programs once their Pi is up and running.

    We’ll also continue to produce the existing Raspbian Lite image for people who only want a command-line version with no desktop.

    Update Raspbian

    Both the new images are available to download from the usual place on our site.

    To update an existing image, open a terminal window and use the usual commands:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

    To install the new VLC media player from a terminal, enter:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install vlc

    As ever, all feedback is welcome, so please leave a comment below!

    Website: LINK

  • Raspbian update: first-boot setup wizard and more

    Raspbian update: first-boot setup wizard and more

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    After a few months of hiding in a dark corner of the office muttering to myself (just ask anyone who sits near me how much of that I do…), it’s time to release another update to the Raspberry Pi desktop with a few new bits and a bunch of bug fixes (hopefully more fixes than new bugs, anyway). So, what’s changed this time around?

    Setup wizard

    One of the things about Raspbian that has always been a bit unhelpful is that when a new user first boots up a new Pi, they see a nice desktop picture, but they might not have much of an idea what they ought to do next. With the new update, whenever a new Raspbian image is booted for the first time, a simple setup wizard runs automatically to walk you through the basic setup operations.

    Localisation

    The localisation settings you can access via the main Raspberry Pi Configuration application are fairly complex and involve making separate settings for location, keyboard, time zone, and WiFi country. The first page of the wizard should make this a little more straightforward — once you choose your country, the wizard will show you the languages and time zones used in that country. When you’ve selected yours, the wizard should take care of all the necessary international settings. This includes the WiFi country, which you need to set before you can use the wireless connectivity on a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

    Raspbian update June 2018

    There will be some special cases — e.g. expatriates using a Pi and wanting to set it to a language not spoken in their country of residence — where this wizard will not give sufficient flexibility. But we hope that for perhaps 90% of users, this one page will do everything necessary in terms of international settings. (The more detailed settings in Raspberry Pi Configuration will, of course, remain available.)

    Other settings

    The next pages in the wizard will walk you through changing your password, connecting to the internet, and performing an initial software update to make sure you get any patches and fixes that may have been released since your Raspbian image was created.

    Raspbian update June 2018

    On the last page, you will be prompted to reboot if necessary. Once you get to the end of the wizard, it will not reappear when your Pi is booted. (If you do want to use it again for some reason, just run it manually by typing

    sudo piwiz

    into a terminal window and pressing Enter.)

    Recommended software

    Over the last few years, several third-party companies have generously offered to provide software for Pi users, in some cases giving free licenses for software that normally requires a license fee. We’ve always included these applications in our standard image, as people might never find out about them otherwise, but the applications perhaps aren’t all of interest to every user.

    So to try and keep the size of the image down, and to avoid cluttering the menus with applications that not everyone wants, we’ve introduced a Recommended Software program which you can find in the Preferences menu.

    Raspbian update June 2018

    Think of this as our version of the Apple App Store, but with everything in it available for free! Installing a program is easy: just put a tick in the box to the right, and click “OK”. You can also uninstall some of the preinstalled programs: just untick the respective box and click “OK”. You can even reinstall them once you’ve realised you didn’t mean to uninstall them: just tick the box again and click — oh, you get the idea…

    As we find new software that we recommend, or as more manufacturers offer us programs, we’ll add them to Recommended Software, so it’ll be kept up to date.

    New PDF viewer

    Ever since the first version, Raspbian has included the venerable PDF viewer Xpdf. While this program does work, it’s fairly old and clunky, and we’ve been trying to find something better.

    In this release, we are replacing Xpdf with a program called qpdfView, which is a much-improved PDF viewer. It has a more modern user interface, it renders pages faster, and it preloads and caches future pages while you’re reading, which should mean fewer pauses spent waiting for the next page to load.

    Raspbian update June 2018

    If you want something to read in it, we are now including the latest issue of The MagPi as a PDF file — look in the ‘MagPi’ directory in your home directory ‘pi’.

    Other updates

    The Chromium browser is now at version 65. We’ve also updated the links to our website in the Help menu, and added a new Getting Started option. This links to some really helpful new pages that walk you through getting your Pi up and running and using some of its key features.

    If you have volume up/down buttons on your keyboard, these will now control whatever audio output device is selected, rather than only controlling the internal audio hardware. The resolution has also been increased: each button push increases or decreases the volume by 5% rather than 10%.

    If you are using the network icon to reconnect to a wireless network, the passcode for the network will be shown in the connection dialog, so you won’t have to type it in again.

    In Raspberry Pi Configuration, you can now enable and disable the serial port console independently of the serial port hardware.

    The keyboard layout setting dialogue now makes settings that should be correct both in the desktop and also when the Pi is booted to console.

    There are various other small bug fixes and tweaks to appearance and behaviour, but they’re mostly only the sort of things you’d spot if you’re a slightly obsessive user interface developer…

    How do I get it?

    The new image is available for download from the usual place: our Downloads page. We’ve also updated the x86 image with most of the changes, and that’s up on the page as well.

    To update an existing image, use the usual terminal command:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

    Here’s a quick video run-through of the process:

    Updating Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi || Raspberry Pi Foundation

    How to update to the latest version of Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi.

    To install the new PDF viewer (and remove the old one):

    sudo apt-get install qpdfview
    sudo apt-get purge xpdf

    To install the new Recommended Software program:

    sudo apt-get install rp-prefapps

    Finally, to install the setup wizard (which really isn’t necessary on an existing image, but just in case you are curious…):

    sudo apt-get install piwiz

    We hope you like the changes — as ever, all feedback is welcome, so please leave a comment below!

    Website: LINK

  • Raspbian update: supporting different screen sizes

    Raspbian update: supporting different screen sizes

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    You may have noticed that we released a updated Raspbian software image yesterday. While the main reason for the new image was to provide support for the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, the image also includes, alongside the usual set of bug fixes and minor tweaks, one significant chunk of new functionality that is worth pointing out.

    Updating Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi

    How to update to the latest version of Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi.

    Compatibility

    As a software developer, one of the most awkward things to deal with is what is known as platform fragmentation: having to write code that works on all the different devices and configurations people use. In my spare time, I write applications for iOS, and this has become increasingly painful over the last few years. When I wrote my first iPhone application, it only had to work on the original iPhone, but nowadays any iOS application has to work across several models of iPhone and iPad (which all have different processors and screens), and also across the various releases of iOS. And that’s before you start to consider making your code run on Android as well…

    Screenshot of clean Raspbian desktop

    The good thing about developing for Raspberry Pi is that there is only a relatively small number of different models of Pi hardware. We try our best to make sure that, wherever possible, the Raspberry Pi Desktop software works on every model of Pi ever sold, and we’ve managed to do this for most of the software in the image. The only exceptions are some of the more recent applications like Chromium, which won’t run on the older ARM6 processors in the Pi 1 and the Pi Zero, and some applications that run very slowly due to needing more memory than the older platforms have.

    Raspbian with different screen resolutions

    But there is one area where we have no control over the hardware, and that is screen resolution. The HDMI port on the Pi supports a wide range of resolutions, and when you include the composite port and display connector as well, people can be using the desktop  on a huge number of different screen sizes.

    Supporting a range of screen sizes is harder than you might think. One problem is that the Linux desktop environment is made up of a large selection of bits of software from various different developers, and not all of these support resizing. And the bits of software that do support resizing don’t all do it in the same way, so making everything resize at once can be awkward.

    This is why one of the first things I did when I first started working on the desktop was to create the Appearance Settings application in order to bring a lot of the settings for things like font and icon sizes into one place. This avoids users having to tweak several configuration files whenever they wanted to change something.

    Screenshot of appearance settings application in Raspbian

    The Appearance Settings application was a good place to start regarding support of different screen sizes. One of the features I originally included was a button to set everything to a default value. This was really a default setting for screens of an average size, and the resulting defaults would not have worked that well on much smaller or much larger screens. Now, there is no longer a single defaults button, but a new Defaults tab with multiple options:

    Screenshot of appearance settings application in Raspbian

    These three options adjust font size, icon size, and various other settings to values which ought to work well on screens with a high or low resolution. (The For medium screens option has the same effect as the previous defaults button.) The results will not be perfect in all circumstances and for all applications — as mentioned above, there are many different components used to create the desktop, and some of them don’t provide any way of resizing what they draw. But using these options should set the most important parts of the desktop and installed applications, such as icons, fonts, and toolbars, to a suitable size.

    Pixel doubling

    We’ve added one other option for supporting high resolution screens. At the bottom of the System tab in the Raspberry Pi Configuration application, there is now an option for pixel doubling:

    Screenshot of configuration application in Raspbian

    We included this option to facilitate the use of the x86 version of Raspbian with ultra-high-resolution screens that have very small pixels, such as Apple’s Retina displays. When running our desktop on one of these, the tininess of the pixels made everything too small for comfortable use.

    Enabling pixel doubling simply draws every pixel in the desktop as a 2×2 block of pixels on the screen, making everything exactly twice the size and resulting in a usable desktop on, for example, a MacBook Pro’s Retina display. We’ve included the option on the version of the desktop for the Pi as well, because we know that some people use their Pi with large-screen HDMI TVs.

    As pixel doubling magnifies everything on the screen by a factor of two, it’s also a useful option for people with visual impairments.

    How to update

    As mentioned above, neither of these new functionalities is a perfect solution to dealing with different screen sizes, but we hope they will make life slightly easier for you if you’re trying to run the desktop on a small or large screen. The features are included in the new image we have just released to support the Pi 3B+. If you want to add them to your existing image, the standard upgrade from apt will do so. As shown in the video above, you can just open a terminal window and enter the following to update Raspbian:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

    As always, your feedback, either in comments here or on the forums, is very welcome.

    Website: LINK

  • GPIO expander: access a Pi’s GPIO pins on your PC/Mac

    GPIO expander: access a Pi’s GPIO pins on your PC/Mac

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Use the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi Zero while running Debian Stretch on a PC or Mac with our new GPIO expander software! With this tool, you can easily access a Pi Zero’s GPIO pins from your x86 laptop without using SSH, and you can also take advantage of your x86 computer’s processing power in your physical computing projects.

    A Raspberry Pi zero connected to a laptop - GPIO expander

    What is this magic?

    Running our x86 Stretch distribution on a PC or Mac, whether installed on the hard drive or as a live image, is a great way of taking advantage of a well controlled and simple Linux distribution without the need for a Raspberry Pi.

    The downside of not using a Pi, however, is that there aren’t any GPIO pins with which your Scratch or Python programs could communicate. This is a shame, because it means you are limited in your physical computing projects.

    I was thinking about this while playing around with the Pi Zero’s USB booting capabilities, having seen people employ the Linux gadget USB mode to use the Pi Zero as an Ethernet device. It struck me that, using the udev subsystem, we could create a simple GUI application that automatically pops up when you plug a Pi Zero into your computer’s USB port. Then the Pi Zero could be programmed to turn into an Ethernet-connected computer running pigpio to provide you with remote GPIO pins.

    So we went ahead and built this GPIO expander application, and your PC or Mac can now have GPIO pins which are accessible through Scratch or the GPIO Zero Python library. Note that you can only use this tool to access the Pi Zero.

    You can also install the application on the Raspberry Pi. Theoretically, you could connect a number of Pi Zeros to a single Pi and (without a USB hub) use a maximum of 140 pins! But I’ve not tested this — one for you, I think…

    Making the GPIO expander work

    If you’re using a PC or Mac and you haven’t set up x86 Debian Stretch yet, you’ll need to do that first. An easy way to do it is to download a copy of the Stretch release from this page and image it onto a USB stick. Boot from the USB stick (on most computers, you just need to press F10 during booting and select the stick when asked), and then run Stretch directly from the USB key. You can also install it to the hard drive, but be aware that installing it will overwrite anything that was on your hard drive before.

    Whether on a Mac, PC, or Pi, boot through to the Stretch desktop, open a terminal window, and install the GPIO expander application:

    sudo apt install usbbootgui

    Next, plug in your Raspberry Pi Zero (don’t insert an SD card), and after a few seconds the GUI will appear.

    A screenshot of the GPIO expander GUI

    The Raspberry Pi USB programming GUI

    Select GPIO expansion board and click OK. The Pi Zero will now be programmed as a locally connected Ethernet port (if you run ifconfig, you’ll see the new interface usb0 coming up).

    What’s really cool about this is that your plugged-in Pi Zero is now running pigpio, which allows you to control its GPIOs through the network interface.

    With Scratch 2

    To utilise the pins with Scratch 2, just click on the start bar and select Programming > Scratch 2.

    In Scratch, click on More Blocks, select Add an Extension, and then click Pi GPIO.

    Two new blocks will be added: the first is used to set the output pin, the second is used to get the pin value (it is true if the pin is read high).

    This a simple application using a Pibrella I had hanging around:

    A screenshot of a Scratch 2 program - GPIO expander

    With Python

    This is a Python example using the GPIO Zero library to flash an LED:

    pi@raspberrypi:~ $ export GPIOZERO_PIN_FACTORY=pigpio
    pi@raspberrypi:~ $ export PIGPIO_ADDR=fe80::1%usb0
    pi@raspberrypi:~ $ python3
    >>> from gpiozero import LED
    >>> led = LED(17)
    >>> led.blink()
    A Raspberry Pi zero connected to a laptop - GPIO expander

    The pinout command line tool is your friend

    Note that in the code above the IP address of the Pi Zero is an IPv6 address and is shortened to fe80::1%usb0, where usb0 is the network interface created by the first Pi Zero.

    With pigs directly

    Another option you have is to use the pigpio library and the pigs application and redirect the output to the Pi Zero network port running IPv6. To do this, you’ll first need to set some environment variable for the redirection:

    pi@raspberrypi:~ $ export PIGPIO_ADDR=fe80::1%usb0
    pi@raspberrypi:~ $ pigs bc2 0x8000
    pi@raspberrypi:~ $ pigs bs2 0x8000

    With the commands above, you should be able to flash the LED on the Pi Zero.

    The secret sauce

    I know there’ll be some people out there who would be interested in how we put this together. And I’m sure many people are interested in the ‘buildroot’ we created to run on the Pi Zero — after all, there are lots of things you can create if you’ve got a Pi Zero on the end of a piece of IPv6 string! For a closer look, find the build scripts for the GPIO expander here and the source code for the USB boot GUI here.

    And be sure to share your projects built with the GPIO expander by tagging us on social media or posting links in the comments!

    Website: LINK

  • Stretch for PCs and Macs, and a Raspbian update

    Stretch for PCs and Macs, and a Raspbian update

    Reading Time: 6 minutes

    Today, we are launching the first Debian Stretch release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop for PCs and Macs, and we’re also releasing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch for your Pi.

    Raspberry Pi Desktop Stretch splash screen

    For PCs and Macs

    When we released our custom desktop environment on Debian for PCs and Macs last year, we were slightly taken aback by how popular it turned out to be. We really only created it as a result of one of those “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversations we sometimes have in the office, so we were delighted by the Pi community’s reaction.

    Seeing how keen people were on the x86 version, we decided that we were going to try to keep releasing it alongside Raspbian, with the ultimate aim being to make simultaneous releases of both. This proved to be tricky, particularly with the move from the Jessie version of Debian to the Stretch version this year. However, we have now finished the job of porting all the custom code in Raspbian Stretch to Debian, and so the first Debian Stretch release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop for your PC or Mac is available from today.

    The new Stretch releases

    As with the Jessie release, you can either run this as a live image from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card or install it as the native operating system on the hard drive of an old laptop or desktop computer. Please note that installing this software will erase anything else on the hard drive — do not install this over a machine running Windows or macOS that you still need to use for its original purpose! It is, however, safe to boot a live image on such a machine, since your hard drive will not be touched by this.

    We’re also pleased to announce that we are releasing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch for your Pi today. The Pi and PC versions are largely identical: as before, there are a few applications (such as Mathematica) which are exclusive to the Pi, but the user interface, desktop, and most applications will be exactly the same.

    For Raspbian, this new release is mostly bug fixes and tweaks over the previous Stretch release, but there are one or two changes you might notice.

    File manager

    The file manager included as part of the LXDE desktop (on which our desktop is based) is a program called PCManFM, and it’s very feature-rich; there’s not much you can’t do in it. However, having used it for a few years, we felt that it was perhaps more complex than it needed to be — the sheer number of menu options and choices made some common operations more awkward than they needed to be. So to try to make file management easier, we have implemented a cut-down mode for the file manager.

    Raspberry Pi Desktop Stretch - file manager

    Most of the changes are to do with the menus. We’ve removed a lot of options that most people are unlikely to change, and moved some other options into the Preferences screen rather than the menus. The two most common settings people tend to change — how icons are displayed and sorted — are now options on the toolbar and in a top-level menu rather than hidden away in submenus.

    The sidebar now only shows a single hierarchical view of the file system, and we’ve tidied the toolbar and updated the icons to make them match our house style. We’ve removed the option for a tabbed interface, and we’ve stomped a few bugs as well.

    One final change was to make it possible to rename a file just by clicking on its icon to highlight it, and then clicking on its name. This is the way renaming works on both Windows and macOS, and it’s always seemed slightly awkward that Unix desktop environments tend not to support it.

    As with most of the other changes we’ve made to the desktop over the last few years, the intention is to make it simpler to use, and to ease the transition from non-Unix environments. But if you really don’t like what we’ve done and long for the old file manager, just untick the box for Display simplified user interface and menus in the Layout page of Preferences, and everything will be back the way it was!

    Raspberry Pi Desktop Stretch - preferences GUI

    Battery indicator for laptops

    One important feature missing from the previous release was an indication of the amount of battery life. Eben runs our desktop on his Mac, and he was becoming slightly irritated by having to keep rebooting into macOS just to check whether his battery was about to die — so fixing this was a priority!

    We’ve added a battery status icon to the taskbar; this shows current percentage charge, along with whether the battery is charging, discharging, or connected to the mains. When you hover over the icon with the mouse pointer, a tooltip with more details appears, including the time remaining if the battery can provide this information.

    Raspberry Pi Desktop Stretch - battery indicator

    While this battery monitor is mainly intended for the PC version, it also supports the first-generation pi-top — to see it, you’ll only need to make sure that I2C is enabled in Configuration. A future release will support the new second-generation pi-top.

    New PC applications

    We have included a couple of new applications in the PC version. One is called PiServer — this allows you to set up an operating system, such as Raspbian, on the PC which can then be shared by a number of Pi clients networked to it. It is intended to make it easy for classrooms to have multiple Pis all running exactly the same software, and for the teacher to have control over how the software is installed and used. PiServer is quite a clever piece of software, and it’ll be covered in more detail in another blog post in December.

    We’ve also added an application which allows you to easily use the GPIO pins of a Pi Zero connected via USB to a PC in applications using Scratch or Python. This makes it possible to run the same physical computing projects on the PC as you do on a Pi! Again, we’ll tell you more in a separate blog post this month.

    Both of these applications are included as standard on the PC image, but not on the Raspbian image. You can run them on a Pi if you want — both can be installed from apt.

    How to get the new versions

    New images for both Raspbian and Debian versions are available from the Downloads page.

    It is possible to update existing installations of both Raspbian and Debian versions. For Raspbian, this is easy: just open a terminal window and enter

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

    Updating Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi

    How to update to the latest version of Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi. Download Raspbian here: More information on the latest version of Raspbian: Buy a Raspberry Pi:

    It is slightly more complex for the PC version, as the previous release was based around Debian Jessie. You will need to edit the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list, using sudo to do so. In both files, change every occurrence of the word “jessie” to “stretch”. When that’s done, do the following:

    sudo apt-get update 
    sudo dpkg --force-depends -r libwebkitgtk-3.0-common
    sudo apt-get -f install
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
    sudo apt-get install python3-thonny
    sudo apt-get install sonic-pi=2.10.0~repack-rpt1+2
    sudo apt-get install piserver
    sudo apt-get install usbbootgui
    

    At several points during the upgrade process, you will be asked if you want to keep the current version of a configuration file or to install the package maintainer’s version. In every case, keep the existing version, which is the default option. The update may take an hour or so, depending on your network connection.

    As with all software updates, there is the possibility that something may go wrong during the process, which could lead to your operating system becoming corrupted. Therefore, we always recommend making a backup first.

    Enjoy the new versions, and do let us know any feedback you have in the comments or on the forums!

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