It’s now just under two years since we released the Jessie version of Raspbian. Those of you who know that Debian run their releases on a two-year cycle will therefore have been wondering when we might be releasing the next version, codenamed Stretch. Well, wonder no longer – Raspbian Stretch is available for download today!
This tutorial is a brief description for how to install the Raspberry Pi OS on your SD-Card. Follow these steps carefully! Raspberry Pi 6. Raspberry Pi 16GB (NOOBS – Preloaded). Raspberry Pi Raspbian Class 10 8 GB microSD. The Raspbian microSD Card by features a safe and Best SD Card for Raspberry Pi 3. Notably, the SD card is also class 10 and thus will perform excellently with your data storage and transfer, including videos, and be faster that your regular.
Debian releases are named after characters from Disney Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy. In case, like me, you were wondering: Stretch is a purple octopus from Toy Story 3. Hi, Stretch!
The differences between Jessie and Stretch are mostly under-the-hood optimisations, and you really shouldn’t notice any differences in day-to-day use of the desktop and applications. (If you’re really interested, the technical details are in the Debian release notes here.)
However, we’ve made a few small changes to our image that are worth mentioning.
New versions of applications
Version 3.0.1 of Sonic Pi is included – this includes a lot of new functionality in terms of input/output. See the Sonic Pi release notes for more details of exactly what has changed.
The Chromium web browser has been updated to version 60, the most recent stable release. This offers improved memory usage and more efficient code, so you may notice it running slightly faster than before. The visual appearance has also been changed very slightly.
Bluetooth audio
In Jessie, we used PulseAudio to provide support for audio over Bluetooth, but integrating this with the ALSA architecture used for other audio sources was clumsy. For Stretch, we are using the bluez-alsa package to make Bluetooth audio work with ALSA itself. PulseAudio is therefore no longer installed by default, and the volume plugin on the taskbar will no longer start and stop PulseAudio. From a user point of view, everything should still work exactly as before – the only change is that if you still wish to use PulseAudio for some other reason, you will need to install it yourself.
Better handling of other usernames
The default user account in Raspbian has always been called ‘pi’, and a lot of the desktop applications assume that this is the current user. This has been changed for Stretch, so now applications like Raspberry Pi Configuration no longer assume this to be the case. This means, for example, that the option to automatically log in as the ‘pi’ user will now automatically log in with the name of the current user instead.
One other change is how sudo is handled. By default, the ‘pi’ user is set up with passwordless sudo access. We are no longer assuming this to be the case, so now desktop applications which require sudo access will prompt for the password rather than simply failing to work if a user without passwordless sudo uses them.
Scratch 2 Sense HAT extension
In the last Jessie release, we added the offline version of Scratch 2. While Scratch 2 itself hasn’t changed for this release, we have added a new extension to allow the Sense HAT to be used with Scratch 2. Look under ‘More Blocks’ and choose ‘Add an Extension’ to load the extension.
This works with either a physical Sense HAT or with the Sense HAT emulator. If a Sense HAT is connected, the extension will control that in preference to the emulator.
Fix for Broadpwn exploit
A couple of months ago, a vulnerability was discovered in the firmware of the BCM43xx wireless chipset which is used on Pi 3 and Pi Zero W; this potentially allows an attacker to take over the chip and execute code on it. The Stretch release includes a patch that addresses this vulnerability.
There is also the usual set of minor bug fixes and UI improvements – I’ll leave you to spot those!
How to get Raspbian Stretch
As this is a major version upgrade, we recommend using a clean image; these are available from the Downloads page on our site as usual.
Upgrading an existing Jessie image is possible, but is not guaranteed to work in every circumstance. If you wish to try upgrading a Jessie image to Stretch, we strongly recommend taking a backup first – we can accept no responsibility for loss of data from a failed update.
To upgrade, first modify the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list. In both files, change every occurrence of the word ‘jessie’ to ‘stretch’. (Both files will require sudo to edit.)
Then open a terminal window and execute
Answer ‘yes’ to any prompts. There may also be a point at which the install pauses while a page of information is shown on the screen – hold the ‘space’ key to scroll through all of this and then hit ‘q’ to continue.
Finally, if you are not using PulseAudio for anything other than Bluetooth audio, remove it from the image by entering
Updates
Since the release, we’ve had a few small issues reported. Here’s an update on them:
- There is a bug in the Raspberry Pi Configuration window which means the “Set Keyboard…” button on the Localisation tab doesn’t work.
- There is an intermittent bug in the interaction between the RealVNC server application and the desktop – you might find that the taskbar sometimes vanishes when booting if the VNC server is enabled. This is intermittent, so rebooting a few times may help. If not, to get the taskbar to display, hit Ctrl-Alt-T to display a terminal window, and in the terminal enter
lxpanel -p LXDE-pi
; you’ll need to leave that terminal open while running. - There is a bug in the hardware video acceleration for the Chromium browser, which is causing crashes on some videos and animations.
Fixes for these three bugs are now available for download – to get them, do:
Some users have also noticed that the Chinese and Japanese fonts are missing, resulting in garbled text when the locale is changed. This is due to a font package which was present in Jessie but not included in Stretch. A suitable alternative is the Droid fonts package – to install it, do:
On this page
- 3 Setting up the Pi
So, are you a person who got a Raspberry Pi (aka 'Pi') and want to start building something with it but don't know how to go about it? If yes, then this tutorial is for you. Here in this howto, we go about installing the Raspbian OS and initiating a desktop environment.
Introduction
Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized micro processor available in different models with different processing speed starting from 700 MHz. Whether you have a model B or model B+, or the very old version, the installation process remains the same. People who have checked out the official Raspberry Pi website, might have seen them recommending the 'NOOBS' or 'NOOBS LITE' Operating System (aka 'OS') for beginners. But using the Pi is very easy and from being a beginner, one will turn pro in no time. So, it's better to go with the more powerful and more efficient OS, the Raspbian. The main reason why Raspbian is extremely popular is that it has thousands of pre built libraries to perform many tasks and optimize the OS. This forms a huge advantage while building applications.
1 Downloading Raspbian and Image writer
Download the latest version of Raspbian from here. You can download it directly or via the torrents.
You will be needing an image writer to write the downloaded OS into the SD card (micro SD card in case of Raspberry Pi B+ model). So download the 'win32 disk imager' from here.
2 Writing the image
Insert the SD card into the laptop/pc and run the image writer. Once open, browse and select the downloaded Raspbian image file. Select the correct device, that is the drive representing the SD card. If the drive (or device) selected is different from the SD card then the other selected drive will become corrupted. SO be careful.
After that, click on the 'Write' button in the bottom. As an example, see the image below, where the SD card (or micro SD) drive is represented by the letter 'G:'
Once the write is complete, eject the SD card and insert it into the Raspberry Pi and turn it on. It should start booting up.
3 Setting up the Pi
Please remember that after booting the Pi, there might be situations when the user credentials like the 'username' and password will be asked. Raspberry Pi comes with a default user name and password and so always use it whenever it is being asked. The credentials are:
When the Pi has been booted for the first time, a configuration screen called the 'Setup Options' should appear and it will look like the image below.
If you have missed the 'Setup Options' screen, its not a problem, you can always get it by typing the following command in the terminal.
Once you execute this command the 'Setup Options' screen will come up as shown in the image above.
Now that the Setup Options window is up, we will have to set a few things. After completing each of the steps below, if it asks to reboot the Pi, please do so. After the reboot, if you don't get the 'Setup Options' screen, then follow the command given above to get the screen/window.
The first thing to do:
select the first option in the list of the setup options window, that is select the 'Expand Filesystem' option and hit the enter key. We do this to make use of all the space present on the SD card as a full partition. All this does is, expand the OS to fit the whole space on the SD card which can then be used as the storage memory for the Pi.The second thing to do:
select the third option in the list of the setup options window, that is select the 'Enable Boot To Desktop/Scratch' option and hit the enter key. It will take you to another window called the 'choose boot option' window that looks like the image below.
In the 'choose boot option window' , select the second option, that is, 'Desktop Log in as user 'pi' at the graphical desktop' and hit the enter button. Once done you will be taken back to the 'Setup Options' page, if not select the 'OK' button at the bottom of this window and you will be taken back to the previous window. We do this because we wan to boot into the desktop environment which we are familiar with. If we don't do this step then the Raspberry Pi boots into a terminal each time with no GUI options.
Once, both the steps are done, select the 'finish' button at the bottom of the page and it should reboot automatically. If it doesn't, then use the following command in the terminal to reboot.
4 Updating the firmware
After the reboot from the previous step, if everything went right, then you will end up on the desktop which looks like the image below.
Once you are on the desktop, open a terminal and enter the following command to update the firmware of the Pi.
Updating the firmware is necessary because certain models of the Pi might not have all the required dependencies to run smoothly or it may have some bug. The latest firmware might have the fix to those bugs, thus its very important to update it in the beginning itself.
5 Conclusion
So, we have covered the steps to get the Pi up and running. This method works on all the different models of Raspberry Pi ( model A, B, B+ and also RPi 2) as Raspbain was made to be supported on all models. However, while installing other software or libraries , the procedure might change a bit while installing depending on the model of the Pi or the version of Raspbian itself. The concept of Raspberry is to keep trying till you get he result or build that you want. This might involve a lot of trial and error but spending the time will be worth it. The actual usage doesn't end here. This is just the beginning. It is up to you to go ahead to build something amazing out of it.