Raspbian Jessie

Announcements
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It’ll come to your attention sooner or later, but the newest release of Raspbian, Jessie, is finally available: Raspbian Jessie is here - Raspberry Pi

Jessie is not just an iterative release, but is Raspbian built against the new major version of Debian. From the blog post:

To try out Jessie, if you’re so inclined, you should grab yourself a new SD card, download the image from here: Raspberry Pi OS – Raspberry Pi and install it. This will leave you your Raspbian image to go back to ( or retrieve files from ) if you need to.

Help! X is broken in jessie!

I don’t believe there will be any critical problems in the switch to Jessie, but those are famous last words. At time of writing I haven’t tested any of our products/installers against the released version.

Jessie runs Kernel 4.1, which is basically the same Kernel as you’ll get doing a “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade” on your old Raspbian install.

smbus always saying it’s not installed…

You’ve probably already missed the bug, but there was a dodgy version of the python-smbus packages which would always fail to import in Python. You can fix it with:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall python-smbus python3-smbus
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The recently released ‘regular’ 2015-11-21 image of Raspbian Jessie should cause no particular trouble in installing Pimoroni products (after the recent tweaks to the scripts).

For customers wanting to use the new ‘headless’ flavour (version with no ‘desktop’ environment provided), the so-called ‘lite’, however, until the installers are adjusted, here are a few simple steps you can take to smooth things out:

sudo apt-get install git
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/pip3 /usr/bin/pip-3.2