13th May 2016 Changes to the Raspbian Jessie Desktop

[ShiftPlusOne]

I'm disappointed that you were not offered the courtesy of being able to comment on their plans. (But given the way other community contributors have been treated in the past, maybe not surprised... )

No offence to joan intended. I did consider sending an email as a heads up or sending a PR, but given the unlicense license of the software, it seemed like there wouldn't be any drama either way. Instead, I just tried to keep the package as close to the intended installation as possible.

[joan]

...
It was noted as a possibility in a blog post by Ben Nuttall: http://bennuttall.com/whats-new-gpio-zero-v1-2/

Scroll down to "pigpio and pigpio" under "Alternative pin implementations"

I'm disappointed that you were not offered the courtesy of being able to comment on their plans. (But given the way other community contributors have been treated in the past, maybe not surprised... )

Don't get me wrong. I was aware of things happening in the background. I keep an eye on new tickets opened on the various libraries so I can fix the same issues in pigpio. I'm just pleased it has been packaged for the Foundation image.

[FTrevorGowen]

I hope on the next upgrade they fix the menu system.
The new SDCard copier and Geany don't show up in the menu....yet. I did an "update" and "dist-upgrade" and currently show this on a RPI3B

Code: Select all

uname -a
Linux rpi5 4.4.9-v7+ #884 SMP Fri May 6 17:28:59 BST 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

The upgrade placed .desktop files in "/usr/share/applications" for both "piclone.desktop" and "geany.desktop", but they don't show up in the menu. I copied the .desktop files to "/usr/share/raspi-ui-overrides/applications"" which will usually prod it into showing the new items, but that didn't work either. I played with the menu editor, making a few changes back and forth to see if it that would list the new items if I made some changes, but they didn't show up.
So after copying the files manually to a second menu list, using the menu editor, restarting lxpanel three times, two reboots, and a shutdown and boot they still don't show up in the menu. Changes will usually show up eventually, but for now I copied the .desktop files to "~/Desktop" so they are desktop shortcuts until they show up in the menu, or I can run "piclone" or "geany" from the command line if I have a terminal open.
I've noticed a few other things.
The BT icon didn't show up in the taskbar. I can add it using the "add/remove" panel items, but it didn't show up by default.
There is no "Empty Wastebasket" option when right clicking on the icon. I had already added a right click "Empty Trash" option, viewtopic.php?f=29&t=136588 and that is there and I've been using it, but there is no new "Empty Wastebasket" entry.
Anyone else see any of this, or is it just me?

There have been menu editor fixes, but what you're describing doesn't seem related. As the blog post says, you need to install piclone and geany yourself.
BT applet should've showed up after you logged out and back in.
Edit: Also, empty trash and empty wastebasket is the same thing, it just depends on your locale which is displayed.

I installed Geany etc. manually as per the blog. Whilst they did not appear immediately in the menu once I'd found them in the menu editor, un-ticked and then re-ticked them they appeared (this has been necessary for other "manually installed" items in the past.). FWIW, I've also given the SD card copying tool a quick test, successfully backing-up/cloning the upgraded card (in a P3B) and subsequently using that to boot up a Pi Zero. The slight "downside" to the process is that, should you use "unique" host names for a given Pi/card combo. that on the cloned card needs to be changed (via raspi-config) - not a problem, but something to be aware of.
Trev.

[joan]

I'm disappointed that you were not offered the courtesy of being able to comment on their plans. (But given the way other community contributors have been treated in the past, maybe not surprised... )

No offence to joan intended. I did consider sending an email as a heads up or sending a PR, but given the unlicense license of the software, it seemed like there wouldn't be any drama either way. Instead, I just tried to keep the package as close to the intended installation as possible.

No offence taken on my part. I thought to mention in my reply to B.Goode that the software is Public Domain (which does sort of have an implied attitude) and that I liked the way it had been packaged.

[ShiftPlusOne]

PS: this post seems to suggest the python bindings are not installed by default - viewtopic.php?f=32&t=148038#p973739

The python packages are in the image, but weren't in the upgrade instructions on the blog post. The blog post is being updated now.

[JimmyN]

There have been menu editor fixes, but what you're describing doesn't seem related. As the blog post says, you need to install piclone and geany yourself.

BT applet should've showed up after you logged out and back in.

Edit: Also, empty trash and empty wastebasket is the same thing, it just depends on your locale which is displayed.

I did install piclone and geany, and as I pointed out when they didn't show up in the menu after restarting lxpanel and rebooting several times I copied the "piclone.desktop" and "geany.desktop" files from "/usr/share/applications" to "~/Desktop/" so I could use them as Desktop shortcuts for now. They still don't show up in the menu.

Logged out and rebooted three times, still no BT Icon until I added it manually using the "Add/remove panel items".

Call it Trash or Wastebasket it doesn't matter. The blog stated that right clicking on the "Trash/Wastebasket" icon would provide a option to empty it, but it's not there.

[blaablaaguy]

Looks like im going to have to get a larger sd card

[ShiftPlusOne]

Looks like im going to have to get a larger sd card

The image size hasn't changed that much. Or were you using a 4GB card?

[mattmiller]

Just tried to upgrade to latest - only issue is samba errors - I did apt-get remove and then I was OK but I can't seem to re-install it either.

Not too worried at moment as everything else seems OK

Matthew

[Heater]

ShiftPlusOne,

I can totally appreciate the idea of stability in Debian. I admire it. It's not so much about bugs and things crashing so much as it about software and it's API's not changing and breaking stuff. Such that one can be sure that an update does not break whatever one has running on top of it.

Actually that has amazed me since 1998 or so. It's amazing how an "apt-get upgrade" has almost never broken any production code.

On the other hand it's really annoying when we look at things like node or Qt. It's crazy that node is so old in Debian/Raspian. It's crazy that getting Qt 5 to work was such a pain for such a long time.

It's crazy that Debian has packages for installing node modules when node has a very fine package manager of it's own, npm. Similarly for Python and pip.

Sometimes I think a distro like Debian should not try to encompass everything. Just give us a stable OS and compilers we can rely on for some length of time.

In fact it's got so bad we have to invent things like Docker to work around it.

[Rive]

I tried ala carte for the new features, and I couldnt get BT, so just bit the bullet and did the dist-upgrade.

I think my issues might have been because of going from the 4.4.9 rpi-update, to the dist-upgrade...I think it may have broken things.

After restoring 4.1.13, menu/run functions like it should, I have not yet tried to re-pair the bt audio to see if the error still occurs though.

Failed to connect to device-
GDBus.Error:org.bluez.Error.failed: Host is down. Try to connect again.

[fixed] bt audio now working.

Took approx 20 min to fix all the raspi-ui-override applications, urls, fix/resize the taskbar, icons, monitors, launch bar settings, and key binding for shortcuts

[ShiftPlusOne]

ShiftPlusOne,

I can totally appreciate the idea of stability in Debian. I admire it. It's not so much about bugs and things crashing so much as it about software and it's API's not changing and breaking stuff. Such that one can be sure that an update does not break whatever one has running on top of it.

Actually that has amazed me since 1998 or so. It's amazing how an "apt-get upgrade" has almost never broken any production code.

On the other hand it's really annoying when we look at things like node or Qt. It's crazy that node is so old in Debian/Raspian. It's crazy that getting Qt 5 to work was such a pain for such a long time.

It's crazy that Debian has packages for installing node modules when node has a very fine package manager of it's own, npm. Similarly for Python and pip.

Sometimes I think a distro like Debian should not try to encompass everything. Just give us a stable OS and compilers we can rely on for some length of time.

In fact it's got so bad we have to invent things like Docker to work around it.

I don't know, I consider pip and npm packages to be rather bleeding edge. npm itself seems rather experimental. You don't want stuff like this happening in a stable distro - http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-te ... -internet/

Don't want to go too far off topic, so I'll shut up about that.

[Heater]

ShiftPlusOne,

I consider pip and npm packages to be rather bleeding edge.

True, node and npm have only been around for a few years. And have been under rapid development in that time.

I have had systems broken by changes to C/C++ compilers, changes to PHP, Python, Windows updates, etc, etc.

If you put anything into production you owe it to yourself to take control of where it comes from.

[Rive]

New BT audio doesn't work with OMXplayer?

[Douglas6]

No, OMXPlayer has never been able to output to Bluetooth.

[Rive]

Just out of curiosity, why did the foundation release this new image with the existing "uart interrupt bug" that severely impacts Pi performance? (nearly an order of magnitude more interrupts per second and context switches per second in 4.4.9 compared to 4.1)

For those who have no clue what that means (like me ), this manifests itself in severe computational (processing power) degradation to the tune of approx 1 billion operations per second or so (as shown in benchmarks)...

viewtopic.php?p=974065#p974065


unused uart is being left with an interrupt asserted but no interrupt handler to clear it

[liz]

Dom explained in the very post you're linking to - this didn't come to our attention fast enough to be added in this round, but a fix will be added to the next update. Thank you for your help, and well done for the spot; but understand that it's a very short time since you raised that bug, and releases like today's are frozen for testing at least a week before we push them - your report came in way too late to make the cut.

[Rive]

Dom explained in the very post you're linking to - this didn't come to our attention fast enough to be added in this round, but a fix will be added to the next update. Thank you for your help, and well done for the spot; but understand that it's a very short time since you raised that bug, and releases like today's are frozen for testing at least a week before we push them - your report came in way too late to make the cut.

ahh. I see.

[mung]

I have serious problems on using the new jessie-lite image, lots of stuff seems broken and my system has been destroyed twice in two attempts to run a custom 'apt-get install' of about 190Mb of packages, and compile script for some unavailabe packages that I will post below.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg xinit lxterminal lxappearance \
 lightdm libssl-dev python-pyftpdlib libmodbus-dev libboost-dev \
 cython avahi-daemon avahi-discover avahi-utils  python-avahi \
 libavahi-common3 libavahi-client3  libavahi-client-dev \
 cmake liburiparser-dev  uuid-dev libprotobuf-dev \
 protobuf-compiler python-protobuf liburiparser-dev \
 uuid-runtime protobuf-compiler python-protobuf \
 libjansson-dev libboost-python-dev libtool libtool-bin \
 libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev \
 libboost-test-dev libboost-system-dev \
 gettext autoconf libpth-dev bc gcc g++ make git \
 libncurses5-dev libxaw7-dev libreadline-dev tcl8.6-dev \
 tk8.6-dev bwidget blt libgtk2.0-dev python-dev python-tk \
 python-lxml libboost-python-dev libtk-img python-imaging-tk \
 python-xlib python-configobj python-gnome2 python-glade2 \
 python-numpy libgl1-mesa-dev python-gtkglext1 python-opengl \
 freeglut3 libglu1-mesa libglu1-mesa-dev python-gtk2-dev \
 python-gtksourceview2 leafpad icewm pcmanfm python-pip
sudo pip install pyzmq
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tipam/pi3d.git

After this I get lots of dpkg errors and dpkg crashes due to 'too many errors'

I am about to test the 16GB kingston SD card that was new this evening on first imaging with win32imager, I will have to repartition and format then try h2testw.

I hope this is some silly mistake I am make because my brain is not in gear

[scruss]

I see a lot of keyboard types to select from but no language layout options.

Does dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration give you any options at all? Or do you just get

Code: Select all

update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults
update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults

?

keyboard-configuration only knows about a select few (essentially legacy) keyboards. If it can't find one of them, it assumes you have no keyboard and quits with those two lines. I hid the problem with a BT keyboard, with some discussion here: Can no longer reconfigure keyboard

[Gerd]

Old and busted: Mathematica shows its splashscreen and then crashes every RPD session. viewtopic.php?f=94&t=131051
New hotness: Mathematica shows its splashscreen in blue and then crashes every RPD session.

blues.png (36.49 KiB) Viewed 5323 times

Something weird going on in XRDP. I will retest this weekend with fresh image, but not today.
For the other reported bug with XRDP (no ldxepanel showing up over XRDP), switching between boot into gui/console in raspi-config and rebooting inbetween solved that one for me.

Apart from this: nice release and thanks for including Geany.

[Rive]

For those who want the

kernel 4.4.9 unused uart is being left with an interrupt asserted but no interrupt handler to clear it

bug fix, you can update to the 5/13/16 kernel 4.4.10 which includes the fix:

cat /proc/version

Code: Select all

Linux version 4.4.10-v7+ ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.9.3 (crosstool-NG crosstool-ng-1.22.0-88-g8460611) ) #885 SMP Fri May 13 15:44:27 BST 2016

An alternative work around, is to simply disable bt (bluetooth) in /boot/config.txt, and wait till the uart bug fix is available via apt-get upgrade.

Workaround:

Code: Select all

# Uncomment to disable Bluetooth
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

Update to 4.4.10 (with uart fix):

Code: Select all

sudo rpi-update

In my case, I have noticed essentially no difference in raspbian 8 kernel 4.4.9 vs kernel 4.4.10 (other than the pi is significantly faster). I have alot of customizations that were broken in the image upgrade that also bumped up from 4.1 to 4.4.9, So trust me when i say upgrade from 4.4.9 to 4.4.10 is painless .

[Heater]

Rive,

I have alot of customizations that were broken in the image upgrade...

I'm wondering what happened. I don't recall Debian ever trashing my tweaks to config files. apt-get upgrade stops when it notices a config file has changed and asks what you want to do about it.

Anyway Kernel 4.4.10-v7+ installed and running nicely here.

[Rive]

Rive,

I have alot of customizations that were broken in the image upgrade...

I'm wondering what happened. I don't recall Debian ever trashing my tweaks to config files. apt-get upgrade stops when it notices a config file has changed and asks what you want to do about it.

Anyway Kernel 4.4.10-v7+ installed and running nicely here.

It was that "dist-upgrade". No other way to get the new BT UI though. Normally I steer clear of dist-upgrades, but had no choice this time around.

Hmm, mine was mostly desktop GUI, some menu shortcuts (ui-override apps), and some custom keyboard shortcuts (keybinding). If there was anything else, i haven't noticed it yet.

I had to restore 4.1 prior to the 'dist-upgrade' because going from the 4.4.9 to the dist-upgrade, left alot of thing broken.

So if you previously did the rpi-update to 4.4.9, then did the 'dist-upgrade', you might be screwed, and that may explain why your stuff got trashed.

[Heater]

I have had any stuff trashed by any upgrade yet. I was talking about what happened to you.

Although a weird thing happened yesterday when the power supply I was testing that Pi 3 with accidentally got switched to 12v !

Let's just say I had to run out and buy a new Pi 3.

I'll have to try and get a nice picture of the damage. It's quite interesting what happened and unexpected.