https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-old-functionality-with-raspberry-pi-os-legacy/ [ ] * For Industry * Hardware * Software * Documentation * News * Forums * Foundation News All news * Archive * RSS "New" old functionality with Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) [52eb19] * 2nd Dec 2021 * Gordon Hollingworth * 35 comments Over the past nine years, Raspberry Pi has only ever supported a single release of the Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian). This can cause significant problems when we move to a new upstream branch (for example when we moved from Jessie to Stretch or from Stretch to Buster, or the recent move from Buster to Bullseye). With the new branches come new versions of libraries and new interfaces. Old software and interfaces become unsupported, and the way to do specific things changes. Some of those come from the upstream and some from our own desire to move to open-source interfaces. Of course, we understand this isn't always the right decision for particular users. For example, some of you are educational users who would like to follow instructions and tutorials online. Others are industrial users, who've developed software to use particular library versions; or who value a stable unchanging operating system. Some of you have asked for an option to roll back certain parts of the OS to restore some functionality that you have been relying on. Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) For this reason, we've decided to create a legacy version of the Raspberry Pi OS based on the Debian Buster release (or, to be more specific, the Debian oldstable release). This is based on: * The previous release of the Raspberry Pi OS based on Buster * Hardware-accelerated Chromium removed and replaced with the upstream software browser * Linux kernel branched at 5.10.y and only taking security patches from the Linux kernel * Raspberry Pi firmware branched and only taking security and hardware support patches for existing products Hardware acceleration of Chromium takes a significant amount of support time; for every release we have to re-port our hardware interfaces. At the same time, it is important that Chromium is supplied with the most recent version available in Debian, since it has many security patches applied to it. For this reason we think using the upstream software-accelerated version by default will be better, although we will still keep the hardware-accelerated v92 browser. [legacyscreenshot-800x450] The Linux kernel APIs are also important. With new versions of the kernel, the interfaces between different layers changes. This means that a driver compiled against 5.10 may not work when compiled against 5.12; it is therefore important to choose a long-term stable Linux kernel such as 5.10 and only take upstream changes. The firmware will be branched to avoid de-stabilising its functionality as it continues to support future hardware. Although we will not support new products on the legacy image, we will make sure any new revisions of older products continue to be supported. So, for example, if we were to release a (currently imaginary) new Raspberry Pi 4 rev 1.5 (which usually means component changes for supply reasons), it would be supported on the legacy image, whereas a new Raspberry Pi product (a future 5 for example, also currently imaginary) would not. Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) will remain supported while the various components continue to receive updates. For Debian Buster, support will be available until June 2024. For Linux 5.10 kernel, December 2026. If Debian Bookworm becomes stable in this time, Raspberry Pi (Legacy) will switch to Bullseye. Download Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) is available to download from our Software page, and can also be found in Raspberry Pi Imager, our free OS installer for Windows, macOS, Ubuntu for x86, and Raspberry Pi OS. Also... If you want to add the legacy camera interfaces to Bullseye, please click your update icon in the taskbar to update. Then open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and type 'sudo raspi-config', go to 'Interface Options' and then 'Legacy Camera', and reboot. These camera interfaces are deprecated, and we are not supporting them going forwards. Lastly... If you were hoping for a blog post about the 64bit OS, that's coming next, we're just fixing some issues in Bullseye before we release it. Share this post * Post to Twitter * Post to Facebook Related posts [toy-story-] Bullseye - the new version of Raspberry Pi OS [Raspberry-] Bullseye camera system [raspberry-] Bullseye bonus: 1.8GHz Raspberry Pi 4 Next Post [Waitrose-A] Custom PC Mince Pie Megatest Previous Post [Screenshot] Music machine multi-player game Share this post * Post to Twitter * Post to Facebook 35 comments Jump to the comment form Avatar Roger H. 2nd December 2021, 5:48 pm For those of us who have been running Raspian Buster for the past couple of years, are there any changes we need to make to sources.list or anything else? Reply to Roger H. Avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Gordon Hollingworth -- post author 2nd December 2021, 9:28 pm You don't need to do anything different, the only thing which will be different is that you'll still be using the old hardware accelerated chromium-browser. This will not get updated and could therefore end up with unpatched vulnerabilities. Reply to Gordon Hollingworth Avatar Miles Raymond 2nd December 2021, 7:36 pm Thanks for all you guys do! I am looking forward to the 64bit branch for the CM3 while still appreciating the 32bit branch for our RPi1! Reply to Miles Raymond Avatar beta-tester 2nd December 2021, 8:11 pm i am wondering why RasPiOS is doing that heavy desktop/userinsteface customisation at all and risking breaking things that needs alot of maintaining. the most trouble happens because of those customisations. why not "transfering" RPi specific firmware, bootloader, graphic drivers to regular Debian repository and then they have to maintaine it. Reply to beta-tester Avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long 3rd December 2021, 11:49 am Because we don't like any of the default Debian desktop environments, and we think ours is better? (You are, of course, free to think otherwise - but I probably wouldn't have spent seven years of my life doing nothing but working on the desktop experience if I didn't think it was making things better...) Reply to Simon Long Avatar Roger Whiteley 3rd December 2021, 4:59 pm That's 7 years a great many of us value very highly - you have done an amazing job, [speaking as someone who has only been messing with computers for over forty years]. Reply to Roger Whiteley Avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long 3rd December 2021, 9:55 pm Thank you for the kind words, Roger. I do hope that most people think that the general direction of travel for the desktop is that it has got better over time. (Even if it's not always a perfectly smooth path upwards - there are occasional bumps in the road, for which we apologise!) Reply to Simon Long Avatar Markus 4th December 2021, 11:53 pm I agree with Roger, Also from someone with well over 40 years experience in computer software development. Avatar Derek Board 5th December 2021, 9:41 am I agreee with Roger, the work done on the RaspiOS has been amazing, thanks to all the team. (by the way is that the Roger Whiteley who worked for a certain large company installing MAP over Broadband in a Luton car factory in the late 80s? I still get the shivers from attending the works manager's early morning closure meetings, heaven forbid if our team was causing problems!) Reply to Derek Board Avatar mgrouch 3rd December 2021, 5:55 pm I've customized Raspberry Pi OS very differently for desktop. I used budgie and I think it's better than default raspberry pi OS. I've also managed to make it work nicely with touchscreen. Default Raspberry Pi OS desktop is hardly usable on touchscreen. You can check whole source and download ready SD card image here https://github.com/bareboat-necessities/lysmarine_gen I hope Raspberry Pi foundation can consider switching to budgie. Thanks Reply to mgrouch Avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Gordon Hollingworth -- post author 3rd December 2021, 2:28 pm Also, the default settings for the Debian standard image were developed for computers that have 200W power supplies. We've made choices that will better fit computers with more modest power consumption. Reply to Gordon Hollingworth Avatar Saud Iqbal 2nd December 2021, 8:43 pm I am also looking for a 64bit Lite or headless version for my Raspberry Pi Server. Reply to Saud Iqbal Avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Gordon Hollingworth -- post author 4th December 2021, 7:33 am You could just download the beta... http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_lite_arm64/images/ Reply to Gordon Hollingworth Avatar Eirikr70 6th December 2021, 8:37 am Been using the beta for at least one month in production without a single issue. The only point missing is the "stable" label. To come soon if I understand well. Reply to Eirikr70 Avatar Dan S. 2nd December 2021, 10:00 pm Are you going to update picamera with new python libcamera bindings in the future? If not, are you going to release a library that's roughly equivalent functionality wise, or are users going to be completely on their own to implement more complex applications? Reply to Dan S. Avatar Michael 3rd December 2021, 12:12 am I tried this on a Pi Zero running headless and it brought back the problem of the VNC displaying 640x480 so I disabled it again. Will libcamera be controllable from Python soon? I have some simple programs that my granddaughter uses to do timelapse animation and it would be good to be able to update them to Bullseye. Reply to Michael Avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Gordon Hollingworth -- post author 3rd December 2021, 6:06 am David is working on a PiCamera2 library which uses the underlying libcamera interface as we speak. Hopefully we'll have something available in beta soon. Reply to Gordon Hollingworth Avatar John 3rd December 2021, 2:36 am Sooooo... if I read this post correctly, there is a Pi 5 that will be released soon? Nice. Reply to John Avatar MW 3rd December 2021, 3:51 am You must be reading a different Blog ?? **whereas a new Raspberry Pi product (a future 5 for example, also currently imaginary) would not.** Reply to MW Avatar Muhammad Najam ul islam 3rd December 2021, 4:49 am hi guyz, i need help , i am doing project on pi3B+. for that i need python version 3.6 but in latest version python 3.9 is installed by default.plz guide me which respbian version has python 3.6 version thankx Reply to Muhammad Najam ul islam Avatar Neil 3rd December 2021, 10:29 am You need to virtualise the OS to make all of these problems go away. There's probably enough computing power to make that a viable option now. Reply to Neil Avatar Miguellinux 3rd December 2021, 12:26 pm In Bullseye, xrdp only shows a black screen, on Buster works perfect!!! How to fix it???? Back to legacy? Reply to Miguellinux Avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long 3rd December 2021, 9:59 pm I had this problem when testing xrdp a few weeks ago - from what I can remember, the black screen is caused by being logged in as the pi user locally and then trying to create an xrdp connection as the same user; xrdp does not allow two connections as the same user. Make sure you are logged out locally as the user as whom you are trying to remotely connect. Reply to Simon Long Avatar Tim Robinson 4th December 2021, 7:45 pm I also can't get xrdp to work on Bullseye. The process xrdb -merge /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-common never ends No problem on buster Reply to Tim Robinson Avatar Ken Thompson 3rd December 2021, 7:47 pm I think I might have found a littel wrinkle. I installled chromium-chromedriver. This deleted chromium and installed something else. I now have chromium-browser.....buster-rpt2 installed. Does this mean I have uninstalled the software accelerated debian version and have installed the hardware accelerated Pi version which will not be updated. Reply to Ken Thompson Avatar David 4th December 2021, 11:09 am I'd like to know this too. I've installed the legacy OS and it came with the chromium v90 package, but this article says that the hardware accelerated is the v92. Which one is it, then? chromium v90*deb-10u1 Or chromium-browser v92*buster-rpt2? Thanks Reply to David Avatar Wen Chen 4th December 2021, 4:50 am On the 64-bit version, will all the recommended software run on it, for example, Mathematica? Reply to Wen Chen Avatar Christopher Barnatt 4th December 2021, 2:54 pm Thanks greatly for this -- all very good news. The option to turn on legacy camera support in Bullseye is most appreciated. Reply to Christopher Barnatt Avatar Fozi 4th December 2021, 8:12 pm The new version does not have Minecraft installed. From the release notes: * Python Games and Minecraft removed from Recommended Software - neither is compatible with bullseye My 8yo was not happy, we are starting over with Buster. So where is the "Buster Full" image that we can use to follow along "THE OFFICIAL Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide" and comes with all the extras like LibreOffice, Scratch, Sonic Pi, Minecraft, Mathematica, BlueJ and Node-RED? BTW I would prefer if you would release images that we can write using Etcher again. The OS I'm looking for (Buster Full) does not appear in the Raspberry Pi Imager. So how can I download and install it? Maybe somewhere from downloads.raspberrypi.org? How to write it to a SD card? I see no image files. Reply to Fozi Avatar Fozi 5th December 2021, 2:58 am OK, I figured it out: - Download the zip file from the images folder (hint: go up) - Etcher is smart enough to write those. It actually even can write it from the URL to the zip file but I downloaded it first, just in case I have to write it again later. - Raspberry Pi Imager has an option for this too, all the way down called "Use custom". Mentions .img, not .zip. I recommend Etcher. - I could have also installed these things on the Pi from the normal "Buster" image from the "Recommended Software" entry in Preferences. Who knew. - This took me longer then it should have as right now, all the documentation online is simply wrong, and a lot of this is not mentioned anywhere. So we're running Raspbian, not switching any time soon. Finally, ready for "Getting Started with Minecraft Pi"! Reply to Fozi Avatar MW 5th December 2021, 3:01 am You can offer .zip files to Etcher & PiInager and it will automatically extract and write: http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_full_armhf/images If you start with an older Buster release you just need to full-upgrade to bring it bang up to date: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/os.html# updating-and-upgrading-raspberry-pi-os Last but not least all support requests are best posted in the Forum....... Reply to MW Avatar Frank Volker 5th December 2021, 5:32 pm When running the legacy software on a RPI Zero 2 W (headless), I get frequent wifi disconnects. Running Bullseye, I have no disconnects. Same 2.5 A ps on both configs. Is this a known problem? Reply to Frank Volker Avatar Ton van Overbeek 6th December 2021, 6:03 pm In Buster power-save is by default on. I had similar problems with a Pi-Zero-W running headless with a small web server: Frequently unreachable (when the wlan power-save kicked in) and spontaneous reboots. In Buster wlan power-save was off. Turn it off in e.g. /etc/rc.local with 'iw dev wlan0 set power_save off'. Since doing this no more problems for me. Reply to Ton van Overbeek Avatar Ton van Overbeek 6th December 2021, 6:05 pm First sentence should be "In Bullseye ..." Reply to Ton van Overbeek Avatar Gabriel 6th December 2021, 8:43 am What do you mean with "currently imaginary"? 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