Raspbian Jessie

[gadgetoid]

It’ll come to your attention sooner or later, but the newest release of Raspbian, Jessie, is finally available: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-jessie-is-here/

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

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.

To try out Jessie, if you’re so inclined, you should grab yourself a new SD card, download the image from here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ 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

[RogueM]

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