A new version of the Raspbian Jessie operating system has been released. The following software packages have been updated:
- Sonic Pi – now at version 2.9
- Scratch has been updated with improved sound input capabilities, support for the CamJam EduKit 3 robotics board, basic PWM support in the GPIO server, and various improvements to the display, including font scaling.
- Mathematica – now at version 10.3
- Node-RED – now at version 12.5
- Wiring Pi – now at version 2.31, allowing GPIO to be accessed without sudo.
- RPi.GPIO library – now at version 0.6.1 fixing some bugs that arose via GPIO Zero.
Various UI bug fixes have also been implemented.
The big news, however, is the inclusion of an experimental OpenGL driver for the desktop which uses the GPU to provide hardware acceleration. This only works on the Pi 2 but should provide a big performance boost for 3D applications and games.
To update to the latest software from an existing Jessie image, do the following:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install raspi-gpio
To add the experimental GL driver, you will also need to run
sudo apt-get install xcompmgr libgl1-mesa-dri
More information can be found on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog.
Hello,
I have been told in the RasPI forum that the use of dist-upgrade
is questionable.
Is the really safe here?
Just to be sure I’ll download it and re-install all my Jessie SDs (thats 8)
-that will give me something to do.
BD
dist-upgrade command may remove some packages. The /etc/apt/sources.list file contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism for overriding the general settings for individual packages.
It is a good pratice to make a backup copy before any upgrade 😉