1
SO WHAT’S NEW?
It’s not exactly a Windows 1 1-style visual reinvention for
Raspberry Pi OS, but there’s a new window manager, Mutter,
in town—unless you’re using a 2 GB (or less) Pi, in which case
you’re stuck with the old openbox, as Mutter writes to memory
before drawing to the screen, and 2GB isn’t enough for it. The UI
toolkit has changed too, from GTK+2 to GTK+3, which might not
sound like much of a change, but is the reason this update has
been so long in arriving. The older version of the OS relied on
GTK+2 features that aren’t replicated in GTK+3.
2
UPDATE FIRMWARE AND OS
It’s worth checking if your firmware is up to date, so type
“sudo rpi-update” into a Terminal window and type “y”
when prompted. If an update is applied, you’ll need to reboot.
Then run “sudo apt update” and “sudo apt dist-upgrade” to make
sure your existing OS is up-to-date and ready for the upgrade. It’s
also worth noting that Raspberry Pi itself does not recommend
an in-place upgrade like this. It’s bound to break stuff and neither
they nor we take any responsibility for when it inevitably all goes
wrong. You have been warned! Back up your SD card now—use
the Pi’s SD card copier app to clone your card.
A NEW VERSION of the Raspberry Pi OS was released not too long ago, and while this may elicit
the same groans as Windows 11 did, there’s actually a good reason to upgrade—if you have the
right chipset. Not all Raspberry Pi 4 boards, it seems, are created equal. We already knew they
differ in terms of the amount of RAM that’s attached, but it seems that if your Pi 4 has the newer
BCM271 1 SoC with a C0T model number—the chipset introduced with the Pi 4 00—then you get
a 300 MHz speed boost from 1.5GHz to 1.8. You may well have already overclocked your Pi, but
it’s welcome nonetheless.
The new OS is based on Debian 11 Bullseye (Debian releases are named after characters
from the Toy Story film and Bullseye is Woody’s horse) and comes in 32 -bit and 64 -bit varieties.
We’re concentrating on the 3 2-bit release here, but if you want to access all the RAM on your Pi
4 8GB, you’re going to want the 6 4-bit release.
You can either upgrade your Pi’s everyday OS or put the new one on a clean SD card (or USB
SSD) to try it out before switching over. You should note that this OS is new and may be a little
flaky in places, but here’s how it’s done. – IAN EVENDEN
YOU’LL NEED THIS
A RASPBERRY PI 3 OR 4
An internet connection
Spare SD card
3
EDIT SOURCES
The Sources file tells the OS where to look for
updates. At the moment it’s searching a folder
called Buster on the Raspberry Pi repository, as that’s
the name of the older OS. To get the new one, open
Sources.list in the nano text editor with “sudo nano /
etc/apt/sources.list” and look for a line that says “deb
http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ buster main
contrib non-free rpi”. Edit ‘buster’ to ‘bullseye’ and leave
the rest the same [Image A]. Type “CTRL + x” to exit, “y”
when prompted to save, and “Enter” to overwrite the file.
4
ANOTHER UPDATE
Now we’re looking in the Bullseye directory, we
can run the update with “sudo apt update” in
Terminal [Image B] followed by “sudo apt dist-upgrade”
and “y” when prompted. You’ll see a lot of text scroll up
the screen, and it will take some time.
5
AN ERROR?
Oh yeah. We got errors. A message reading
“Some packages could not be installed. This may
mean that you have requested an impossible situation...
The following packages have unmet dependencies...”
popped up and stalled the upgrade process. We asked
an expert for some advice and eventually cleared it by
A
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Apart from a new window manager and visual
improvements, you benefit from running a newer Linux
kernel with better security and more efficiency. If you’re
running the right Pi, you get a 30 0MHz speed bump.
There’s a move toward using more open-source software,
with the camera module being operated by libcamera
rather than raspistill. Compatibility with every module
and HAT isn’t there yet, but the new version of Chromium
brings hardware video acceleration and makes watching
YouTube on the Pi less of a slideshow.
There’s now a notification manager, so if you pull out a
USB drive without ejecting it properly you’ll be told off in
the form of a gray rectangle at the top of the screen.
NEW THINGS
56 MAXIMUMPC JAN 2022
R&D
