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Back in August we saw the release of the latest Raspbian. This time it moves away from Wheezy to become the first Raspbian based on Debian Stretch. The biggest change is how the network interfaces are named. In previous releases the wired interface was eth0 and wireless was wlan0, but with Raspbian Stretch they’re now replaced with Predictable Network Interface Names ( http:// bit.ly/debian-new) that provide a consistent interface name based upon the MAC address of the interface (for USB devices such as the Pi) or the index numbers provided by the BIOS for other devices.

Predictable Network Interface Names aren’t new – distros such as Mageia have been using them for a number of years – but this sudden change has caused a small rumble in the Pi Community. Projects that relied on hard-coded network interface names now require tweaking to address the change. It’s possible to instruct Raspbian to use the old interface names, by editing the /boot/cmdline.txt file and adding net.ifnames=0 as the last line, but this is just a stop-gap measure and really we should start to adopt this new interface naming system, which offers greater flexibility.

For those upgrading from Wheezy to Stretch, you’ll see that your interface names remain as eth0/ wlan0 – this issue only affects fresh installations of Stretch on a Pi.

This change helps Raspbian to stay current and inline with the Debian project. I mean, it’s not that much of a problem. Now, had Raspbian moved the window buttons from one corner to another…