Raspbian Jessie
As a connoisseur of all things Raspberry Pi, Les Pounder takes a sniff at the latest Raspbian release from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Discover all of the new fun features and technology inside of the new Pi OS.
Since its début in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has used Raspbian as the official operating system. Looking back at the early versions of Raspbian, we see a rather basic OS that was still in its infancy, but with the latest release of Raspbian we have a whole new beast.
The latest Raspbian is based on Debian Jessie and ships with kernel 4.1.7 by default, and refines the desktop re-design spearheaded by Simon Long in 2014 by shifting to the newer GTK3 toolkit. When you first boot up you will see a major difference to the boot process; it now boots to the Raspbian desktop by default, but this can easily be changed. Raspbian Jessie also ships with a new way to make system configuration changes and this is the RaspberryPiConfiguration application, a GUI for the stalwart raspi-config, which is used to overclock your Pi among other things. Adding applications to the main menu is now made easier thanks to the MainMenu Editor, similar to Alacarte, which has been written in Python. A nice touch is the inclusion of scrot, an application used to take screenshots, something we use a lot when distro hopping.
To further cement the idea that the Raspberry Pi can be used as a typical desktop computer, the Raspbian Jessie comes with the LibreOffice suite and the ClawsMail email client. There are also two new Java IDE: BlueJ and Greenfoot in the Programming menu taking advantage of the Pi 2’s hardware.
Perhaps the biggest change is under the hood. Typically, only the root user or a user with sudo access is able to use the GPIO pins. The workaround is using IDLE, the Python editor, where you’d need to open a terminal and run IDLE with sudo . This isn’t an issue anymore, as now any user can access the GPIO pins via IDLE in the Programming menu. This is a major change and will enable a much easier transition for those learning to code via the GPIO.
Powerful platform
Talking of Python, Raspbian Jessie has a new version of the popular Pygame library called Pygame Zero. This is commonly used to make games with Python but it has a rather steep learning curve. It’s a simpler version of Pygame with a focus on helping educators wanting to enrich coding lessons. Any code written for Pygame Zero uses a text editor or IDLE, but to run it you will need to open a terminal and run pygzrun along with the name of your project.
With this latest release we see why Raspbian is considered to be the de facto distribution (distro). Its mix of thoughtful refinements to established applications, raspi-config and sudo-less GPIO access, and new software, including LibreOffice, which enables the Pi to meet the needs of different user groups and not just coders.
Raspbian Jessie does come at a cost, the install size is well over 4GB, leaving approximately 3GB of available space on an 8GB SD card. This isn’t too high a cost as Raspberry Pi comes with 8GB micro SD cards. But for those of you with older Pi running on a 4GB SD card or the Raspberry Pi Compute, you will need to wait a little longer for a planned ‘lite’ version.
We tested the new release on a Raspberry Pi B+ with 512MB of RAM and can report that it was perfectly usable even with less RAM. However, with 256MB of RAM that’s present on the A and A+ the Pi was slower but this is to be expected.
The Raspberry Pi continues to dominate the single board computer community and the latest Raspbian release will further ensure its dominance, despite a growing threat from the Ubuntu Mate distro.