Raspbian Linux OS Gets Major Update, Adds Bluetooth Support to Pi 3 (betanews.com) 87
An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi 3 was launched with built-in chip for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support, however, software support for Bluetooth was lacking until now. The drivers were there, but today's update to the Raspbian Linux distribution adds much-needed GUI tools to help you establish Bluetooth connections. Another cool addition is a new backup tool. There are other improvements as well including the mouse settings, and the ability to empty the wastebasket through right-clicking as seen below (yes, seriously). There is even a new shutdown dialog, something even casual users should notice.Official blog post here.
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Or a crappy class 4 SD card.
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The most common cause is a weak or flaky power supply. MCM Electronics sells a nice 2.4 Amp supply for a 6 dollars.
http://www.mcmelectronics.com/... [mcmelectronics.com]
I've got 6 of them and I've had zero power problems.
Re: Will it stop slaughtering the SD card? (Score:1)
Nice! (Score:1)
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I thought the RPI was a tiny little ARM computer that you could do embedded stuff with.
The aim was to be a computer that kids could treat as their own and experiment on.
Plently of people used them to do embedded stuff with but that wasn't the primary goal.
Now it's got its own, distinct UI?
Yeah, stock LXDE carried them through the first few years but more recently they have decided to start customising things.
British computing (Score:2)
You wouldn't believe what's ben happening with British computers. They have come a long way in the past 30 years. My last British computer was a ZX81 (pronounced "zed-ex-eighty-one"), and now this Raspberry Pi literally has a million times as much RAM. (OK, only 65536 times as much, because I had the 16K cartridge.) You don't need the tape cassette recorder as persistent storage anymore; it uses a microSD card. And yeah, it comes with a wastebasket. With the ZX81 you needed to provide your own wastebasket.
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Wrong summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wrong summary (Score:5, Funny)
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Well this isn't a tech site so most people won't understand the distinction.
Heâ(TM)s right you know.
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Read 10 Things, which make you sad on slashdot. Number 5 will make you cry.
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After reading the summary, Raspberry Pi 3 gets no update at all, it's Raspbian OS that gets the update.
Well this isn't a tech site so most people won't understand the distinction.
It also doesn't "add Bluetooth support." Support was already there; it just added the capability to make Bluetooth settings in the GUI.
Re: Wrong summary (Score:1)
What kind of gigabit traffic are you planning on running through that micropower credit card sized computer?
I mean, really?
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Re: Wrong summary (Score:4, Informative)
The onboard Ethernet is via a USB to Ethernet controller [microchip.com] which also works as a USB hub. Limited to not just USB 2 speeds, but also controlled by the CPU in software to do the networking. Plug in a USB hard drive, if that's in use your Ethernet slows down. The CPU only has one USB I/O.
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Given it's limitations I'm constantly amazed at what it can do.
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My 1st gen RPi does a good job as a media center [kodi.tv]. Lots of I/O for that.
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I used an original B model for 2 years running XBMC. I moved on to a Pi 2 and relegated the old B model to surveillance cam duty.
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Uhhhh. The Raspberry Pi 2 did get an update -- it is called the Pi 3. If they update the Pi 3, they will call it the Pi 4.
The Pi 3 is actually pretty new. I only heard about it in February.
Do you expect hardware updates every three months?
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Actually they're supposed to have the new Pi Zero out now. It supposedly has some new feature but I haven't heard what.
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The Pi 0 has been "out" for a while (although supplies are very limited, if you can find one in stock).
It is essentially the processor on a board that looks kind of like a memory module. It is intended to be embedded into other things. All it has is HDMI, one USB port, and the micro-SD card slot. No networking at all.
https://thepihut.com/products/... [thepihut.com]
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Ebon severely underestimated the demand. Supposedly production is being ramped up.
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Well it was out but they ran out and haven't made any in a while. Supposedly they added something to it when they restarted production but I don't know what the new feature is.
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To be really pedantic it's about the stuff the raspberry pi foundation build on top of raspbian.
Re:pedant idiot (Score:5, Informative)
No, Mike and I built Raspbian. The raspberry pi foundation then built their images from raspbian packages and their own customisations on top (just as prior to raspbian they had built images from Debian with their own customisations on top). Gradually the volume of customisations they apply has increased.
This article is entirely about customisations they apply on top of raspbian.
Not News (Score:3)
Been using Ubuntu Mate with Bluetooth for my keyboard since I got it months ago.
In other 'news' - Windows 10 can be downloaded for free.......
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Free. Is that what you soul is worth as it sails up to Redmond's data collectors?
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Windows might not be a colossal time sink in most situations
Since when?
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The "Insider Preview" that was free is no more. Already activated installations keep working, but you can't install new ones.
Eh? "Long"? (Score:2)
Long explains the refreshingly simplistic "SD Card Copier".
"Long"?
Hey, editors, try reading what gets submitted to make sure context has not been lost.
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No. The original version of the summary included what I quoted above, but did not include the bit that established who "Long" is.
The summary has since been fixed by removing any mention of Long.
Editor eventually did their job, leaping-to-conclusions on your end.
Re:Where is the 64-bit kernel? (Score:5, Informative)
To clarify
The arm cores on the Raspberry Pi 3 are 64-bit capable (it's a quad-core A53 cluster).
The core bus system and memory controller are limited to 1GB (it uses the upper bits as flags).
By default the firmware starts the arm cores in 32-bit mode. There is an option in config.txt to change this.
There is a small peice of arm-side init code that normally runs after the firmware brings the arm out of reset but before the kernel loads. This is 32-bit only but can be disabled by options in config.txt.
Community members have got a 64-bit kernel and u-boot working (u-boot replaces the functionality that was provided by the arm-side init code). AIUI it's still pretty experimental though.
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The VPU code is a blob but the arm-side code is open.
However there is indeed an issue, communication between the driver in the kernel and the VPU is broken with the current experimental 64-bit kernels because the system assumes a kernel pointer can fit in 32 bits. It's probablly possible to fix this from the arm side with some tricks though.
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Only experimental ones, but here [raspberrypi.org].
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Re:I'd like a 64-bit OS (Score:5, Informative)
Actually you get quite a bit of advantage. The instruction set for 64 bit mode is quite a bit more efficient even when you're not doing 64 bit arithmetic, not least because there are twice as many registers. Code that can be optimised using the SIMD instructions also gets twice as many SIMD registers, which can make a big difference for many graphics, signal processing and mathematical tasks. Most floating point code will be more efficient in 64 bit mode too.
Furthermore the 64 bit address space is useful even with only 1GB of RAM since it allows you to mmap files that are bigger than 4GB. Programs like MongoDB mmap their database files and when running on 32 bit processors MongoDB actually limits processes to a total of 2GB of data in the database, irrespective of how small the working set is. With a 64 bit address space the limit goes from below typical storage sizes to far beyond any plausible storage you'll ever connect to a Pi.
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The Debian ARM64 port is very new. When it was initially released, it was still missing several key components, including Mono, libvp8 (which means no node.js), Go, and Rust. Debian unstable is a little better, but still has a number of missing packages that simply don't build or don't run properly on ARM64 yet.
As for faster instruction execution, that's nice, as long as the larger pointer size doesn't cause more cache misses. Which in turn, depends on the sort of data structures your code uses. Vectors and
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The fact that they run 64 bit doesn't mean it's all rosy. I remeber back when x86 went 64 bit it was quite a while before you could tell any real difference.
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Yes, Debian ARM64 has already been released. That's why I said "when it was initially released." It's hard for something to have had its initial release if it hasn't been released. However, it still doesn't have all the packages that are available for most of its supported platforms. It's somewhere in the 96-98% range, last I checked. Plenty for embedded systems, but perhaps not ideal for a general purpose educational system.
For that matter, there's probably a version of Debian ARM64 available for the Pi. T
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As for faster instruction execution, that's nice, as long as the larger pointer size doesn't cause more cache misses. Which in turn, depends on the sort of data structures your code uses. Vectors and arrays are probably fine; lists and trees may be more problematic.
It helps if the language implementation is not so stupid as to store unencoded pointers on the heap when there's the option of storing them more efficiently. (Assuming the language itself isn't so stupid that it's the only thing it allows, as is the sad case of C. Then your only option is, e.g., jumping through hoops with DataDraw and the like.)
Raspberry Pi Deserves More Memory (Score:2)
The ODROID-C2 seems like a better machine.
I still want a RTC. I like having computers that can operate without being attached to the internet's apron strings. I once had a near nightmare situation whereas the clock was wrong on a computer that was sync'ing files. Never again.
I've been wanting a Raspberry Pi class device, but as much as I want one, I don't need one...I think.
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If your clock is wrong while syncing files, I can only assume that you don't have the NTP daemon running, since you evidently had enough network connectivity to transfer large amounts of data.
If you're completely off the net, I think there's a GPS add-on that will pull atomic time down from the satellites.
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laugh now, that day is coming. Information is power and you better know they wish they'd never let the computer age happen the way it did.
Oversold BUGFIX (Score:2)
Look, I like Rasbian and have run it since my first Raspberry 2+ years ago. But I had unexpected grief with the RPi3 -- I have an RPi2 that was up and running for months (I use a lipstick charger for UPS) and it takes all sorts of USB wifi dongles automagically. So I figure no trouble for the 3.
WRONG! No end of grief, nevermind the obscure pkg imports to wheezy and BRANCH=next kernel upgrades. Wifi would NOT work. Only when I did a fresh install of jessie was it seamless. This 73 MB apt-get didn't do
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I did quite some experimentation to find a lipstick [18650 bat] charger that worked as UPS. Cables also matter--I use short and fat with 0.4ohm loop loss. A cute little LED voltage readout wired to the GPIO shows 4.80V at idle, 4.72 when loaded. But when new software (non-crippleware) fixes a problem, then how can you say it was hardware fault?
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But when new software (non-crippleware) fixes a problem, then how can you say it was hardware fault?
With software, a prior version may have put load on the CPU that was optimized away by a better algorithm. I'd try a benchmark with the same code on both 2 and 3, computing pi or something, and see what happens with the power. (They will both throttle the CPU if if it gets too hot, so use a heat sink.)
Not fully thought out (Score:2)
For people running Windows, there is no /boot/ directory, it's the root of the microSD card. That would have been useful to state.
Secondly it's a shame this isn't documented in a file on t