Raspbian based on Debian Jessie available for Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an update for its Raspbian operating system. Raspbian is based on Debian and with this update uses Debian Jessie, the successor to Debian Wheezy.
That writes Raspberry Pi on its blog. Most of the changes are not immediately visible to the end user, but the flexibility and performance have been greatly improved, in addition to many minor and major bug fixes. The visible changes mainly have to do with the look & feel of the desktop interface.
One of the most notable changes is that when booting from a fresh install the os starts with the desktop and not the command line. This decision was made because ‘this is to be expected of modern computers today; the default interface of a desktop computer in 2015 is a gui,” the developers said. For people who prefer to start with a command-line, there is of course the possibility to set this.
Furthermore, the LXDE desktop now uses gtk+3 and as a result different applications now look slightly different, which in some cases can give a ‘more modern look’. There is now a large ‘eject’ button on the right side of the menu bar for the safe removal of USB drives, to prevent people from simply pulling out a USB drive while write operations are still in progress. In the event of pressing ‘eject’, the system will indicate whether it is safe to eject the drive or whether there is still activity between the OS and the drive.
In order to increasingly turn the Raspberry Pi into a ‘real’ computer, the LibreOffice suite is now included as standard and a mail client called Claws Mail for people who cannot or do not want to use online mail services. For the educational branch, there are now standard programs to write Java applications, namely BlueJ and Greenfoot.
The organization recommends that users do a clean install of the new operating system instead of an upgrade, although there is a so-called ‘unsupported upgrade method’ on the Raspberry forum. But this upgrade is ‘at your own risk’.