Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye Update: New Features & Camera Issues

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to check out bullseye the latest edition of raspy pi os this contains quite a lot of new features as well as technical changes under the surface most of which are very positive indeed however there are issues with camera support and so i'm also going to talk about those which is why this is quite a long video right i thought we'd jump straight in and so here we are in raspberry pi os bullseye edition as you may know raspberry pi os is based on the debian linux distro which receives a major update every two years and the last debian update occurred in august 2021 and was named after bullseye which is the horse in the toy story movies and so here we now have a new edition of raspberry pi os named after the same animated character just to let you know right now i'm running bullseye on a raspberry pi 400 but across the video we'll be testing it out on several different pipe models and what you see here is pretty much how bullseye looks straight out of the box with this lovely new sunset clouds background i really like this new background although i have made here a few changes to scaling and things like that just so it reads better on video so if we go to the web there we are we can see that bullseye can be downloaded from raspberrypi.com and manually written to a microsd card using your favorite imaging software or you can create a new card using the raspberry pi imager application note that whilst it's possible to upgrade an existing raspberry pi os installation to bullseye via the terminal the raspberry pi foundation does not support such upgrades and recommends a clean install and i've already had first-hand reports from people who've had problems doing an upgrade rather than taking the clean install route as usual with all things raspberry pi everything is extensively documented there's a page here which announced for new operating system and there's masses and masses and masses of content here as well as a picture of bullseye the horse after which the operating system is named and there's so much here i'm not going to go through all of it in this video so rather i'm going to pick out the things which to me seem to be the most important firstly on the technical side the toolkit used to create the graphical user interface has been updated from gtk plus 2 to gtk plus 3. and there's also a new window manager called mutter and all of this really matters because the practical implication of these changes is that things look and feel a bit more modern here in raspberry pi os bullseye with for example a little bit of shading here and there and some animation effects and if we right click the panel at the top like that and we look at panel settings you'll see there's quite a lot more here we can adjust including a size setting for the icons on the panel and this is addition to the settings we've got over in raspberry pi os we look at the appearance settings where are we in preferences and appearance almost lost it there we've still got the settings over there where we can change things just to be different sizes large very large etc we've also got the setting now here in panel settings for these icons i do like that i do like to have control of the icon size in the panel this said the new motto window manager does use more memory than the previous open box version and so on raspberry pi models with less than two gigabytes of ram open box is still used next a notification manager has been added to the panel which currently shows a message if for example we eject a usb drive like that will object that drive and we get a notification to say that's happened and we also get notification messages if for example the power supply voltage is too low and if you're wondering we can go into panel settings like this back in there and somewhere in here we can turn off notifications it's somewhere down there there we are we don't have to have notifications on if we don't want to also making use of a notification manager is a new graphical updater which checks for updates on each boot and if there are updates it displays a panel icon which we can see up here to tell us updates are available and we can click to install and either show the updates have a look see what we want to do or if we want we can just do what most people will probably do and install updates and this will now launch a graphical updater which we've not had on the pi before so we now don't have to go to a terminal to do an update and we don't have to go and check if there is an update it's all handled by the new notification system with the new updater and this is a really good development for the pi it moves it forward to be like other operating systems returning to technical changes a very big update indeed is both the display and the camera drivers have been changed specifically the linux kernel mode setting or kms driver is now used to generate the display with a linux library called lib camera used to control the camera these changes mean that two very important and previously closed source proprietary pieces of code have been replaced with open source alternatives and this will make it easier for developers to work with the pie however and it's a very big however indeed changes to the camera driver in particular have major practical implications that will not be welcomed by many users and so i'll return to this subject in depth later in the video other changes of note are that if we look in games over here we will see under games we don't see minecraft and we don't see python games because they're not compatible with bulldog so they can't be there however on the very positive side we've got a new version of the chromium web browser included here in bullseye and wait for it this has been optimized for hardware accelerated video playback so we'll be taking a closer look at youtube playback in bullseye in the next segment of the video something else we're going to be checking out is the fact that in bullseye the default turbo speed has been increased from 1.5 to 1.8 gigahertz for the most recent raspberry pi 4 models which is a very cool thing indeed and finally it is worth noting that like most operating system updates these days bullseye is heavier and more demanding on the hardware than what it's replacing and so it'll be very interesting to see just how practical it is to run this latest version of raspberry pi os on the less powerful raspberry pi computers greetings here i am back again and we're now running bullseye on this 2 gigabyte raspberry pi 4. and it's a fairly early 2 gigabyte raspberry pi 4 so the cpu speed here will not be increased by running bullseye and i've picked this raspberry pi 4 for our youtube playback test on the basis that if youtube plays okay on this board it should work on any raspberry pi 4 and indeed the raspberry pi 400. so let's go across to the desktop and here we are and i thought we'd just have a look in some of the resource things here we'll look at task manager just so you can see what's going on on one of these boards remember this is a two gigabyte raspberry pi 4 and you can see that we've got only about 180 687 megabytes session memory used out of available 2 gigabytes so although bullseye is heavier than previous raspberry pi os distros it's still very light compared to most linux distros and of the memory here a little bit were being used for the gpu let's just look here to show you that look under preferences and raspberry pi configuration bring that up and if we look under i think it's performance isn't it there we are look you can see 76 megabytes of memory has been allocated to the gpu and these are the default settings i've done nothing to this copy of bullseye or they will install it and do a few changes to scaling things to read better on video so let's run up the chromium browser very exciting little animation there as it comes up as we get in bullseye and you may note here we've got plugins here and h.264 if i was already installed to help us with browser-based streaming media playback i had not installed that it was there by default so let's go to our youtube clip my standard playback here my standard sample youtube file bring it up and play it hopefully it'll play it'll take a second just to sort itself out there we are i think it's going now and we'll full screen it as well it's having a think there we are and we'll just check whilst it sorts itself out we really are in 1080p i don't like using the auto there because it never sodium works there we are and it's properly in there into an atp and we'll bring up stats for nerds as well and there we are all set and as you can see youtube playback is pretty good we have got a few drop frames as things settled down but once things do settle youtube playback is pretty good actually it's not absolutely perfect but it's highly usable i've been testing out youtube playback on different versions of the raspberry pi using bullseye for about 10 days now it's very good i've had it connected to my television watching youtube no issues at all so this is a definite win a definite plus using bullseye on the raspberry pi right i've now hooked up the lovely raspberry pi high quality camera to our raspberry pi 4 and i've also switched out the micro sd card for one containing the previous edition of raspberry pi os which is known as buster and if we go across to the desktop here we are i want to show you a couple of things here in buster before we return to bullseye firstly if i run up a terminal like that and i enter this command here which was waiting in the buffer raspy still and a bit of syntax it will bring up a preview of the camera like that and it will take a picture which will be called picture pug as you can see from the code there we are that's what it's done that works absolutely fine and if we also go to a piece of python code i've got sitting here in mugini programmers editor this is a piece of code for my recent raspberry pi time lapse video if we run this code it will again bring up a preview and it will start taking frames at whatever frame rate we specified in the code so as you can see this all works fine using a camera in raspberry pi os buster so let's close this down we'll ctrl c that and we'll close down that as well and we'll just shut down the raspberry pi quickly switch over the micro sd cards and boot back into raspberry pi os bullseye and here we are and if i now go to a terminal and we enter the same raspberry pi still commands like that and press enter we get commands not found and this is because the command's raspberry pi still and the associated command raspberry pi vid only work with the old camera driver and so in bullseye to perform the same function we need to use one of the new lib camera commands specifically this command here we'll give a preview and take a picture so we'll enter on that and that will work it'll bring up a preview with slightly different picture settings but it'll bring up a preview and take a picture which is fine except for the fact that every raspberry pi camera tutorial written since the pi was introduced in 2012 uses the old camera driver terminal commands even more seriously if we go to our python code let's go across here and launch the genie programmers editor and it should bring in by default the code we had earlier my time-lapse code and if we run this code it doesn't work either and it doesn't work because it brings up this no module named pi camera and this is because the python pi camera library does not yet support the new camera interface in bullseye now i should point out that the raspberry pi foundation have documented all this very well indeed on their own web pages so let's just go to the chromium browser and go to the relevant page here we are and if we scroll down here you'll see this is the camera page for the raspberry pi it introduces the raspberry pi cameras talks about the different interfaces and commands associated with them and it's got this big box here explaining the differences between the older menu camera stacks there really is a great deal of useful technical information on this page but what it basically confirms in broader terms is that if you install the latest version of raspberry pi os then all of the existing educational resources out there on the internet for using a pi with a camera will not work without alteration and none of the python code they contain can be run at the present time so to be clear the code in all of my raspberry pi camera and robot videos will not work and of course it's not just about me and my resources it's about everything if we go to google let's go to google.com like that and if we do a search for for example raspberry pi camera python tutorial like that and do enter we will discover quite a lot of documents if i zoom up a bit you will see it's over six million documents come up on that search which is quite a lot of results and admittedly lots of these will be duplicates and won't exist and all that kind of stuff but even so it makes the point that the success of the pie has been built on a large body of resources published by the support community and which are not compatible with bullseye now on november the 17th a blog post was posted by the raspberry pi foundation also on this particular issue let's go to that as well it's down here this came out a little bit later than the actual release of bullseye itself here we are a post all about the bullseye cameras system and i delayed making this review of bullseye until this promised post had been published but sadly what this confirms is that there's currently no camera support in python although a new module called pi camera 2 is in development and this post also reports that none of the official raspberry pi cameras work in bullseye on the new raspberry pi zero 2w so within the space of two weeks a new raspberry pi model and the latest edition of raspberry pi os were launched but you cannot use them together with a camera now in this post it is pointed out i think back at the top let's just go back up there that the previous edition of raspberry pi os pi os buster is still available to download if as they say you're not ready to use bullseye which i find to be somewhat of an understatement if you've just purchased a raspberry pi zero two w and you intend to use it with a camera now okay as the post says some of these things like support for cameras on the raspberry pi zero two w will be fixed shortly but we are clearly stuck with a new set of camera commands in the terminal and that's going to cause confusion for a very long time and there's no time scale for pi camera being implemented in python so right now you can't use a camera in python in the latest edition of raspberry pi os which i think is very strange this is not a good development the foundations of the pi's success have always been backwards compatibility and the community educational resources out there on the internet but sadly with bullseye these foundations appear to have been trashed at least for non-technical users who rely on educational resources and want to use their pi with a camera now let's turn to something more positive which is the increase in the maximum processor speed that bullseye provides for the latest raspberry pi 4 models specifically the cpu's turbo boost speed is increased from 1.5 to 1.8 gigahertz on all raspberry pi 4 boards that have a dedicated switch mode power supply for the soc core voltage rail such boards can be identified by the triangle of black components between the power and hdmi connectors that look like this so if your pi 4 has these components it will get a 300 megahertz turbo boost in bullseye however if it looks like this it's an earlier board and will continue to have a maximum clock speed of 1.5 gigahertz inside this argon 1 case i've got an 8 gigabyte raspberry pi 4 all of which have got the switch mode power supply so this pi will run faster in bullseye and to prove it let's first go to the desktop running buster the previous version of raspberry pi os on this pi where we're going to launch a terminal and i've installed a utility called sysbench on this pi using the command sudo apt install sysbench and it's important to let you know the version of sysbench if i do that command there it'll show us the sysbench version which in raspberry pi buster and previously is sysbench 0.4.12 anyway i'm now going to run a sysbench command so we can check out the speed of the machine i'm going to run this command here which will factor prime numbers to a value of 10 000 and we'll just let that run through and there we are with a little jump forward in time we've done that test in 23.33 seconds so let's use the magic of filmmaking to go across to bullseye running on the same eight gigabyte pi and we'll again launch a terminal and initially again i'm going to show you the version of sysbench i've installed and here it is version 1.0.20 and the big difference is the new version of suspense which installs in raspberry pi bullseye and beyond is constrained by time when you run it rather than by events at least by default and so to run the same test we have to put in this syntax here so again we're doing cpu max prime equals 10 000 but we've actually got on the end here i'll just uh pull this out so you can see it more clearly we've got a threads equal four as we had before because there's four calls on the pi but we've got time set to zero so it's not constrained by time and then this to ten thousand so if we run this very exciting see what the result is going to be and there we are we've got a result of a 20.98 effectively 21 seconds compared if you remember to 23.33 running buster the previous version of raspberry pi os so clearly we get a measurable increase in speed running bullseye rather than the previous version of raspberry pi os on a recent raspberry pi 4. as we can see on the download page the recommended edition of raspberry pi os bullseye remains 32 bit code is included to enable individual applications to access up to four gigabytes of ram so allowing all the memory to be used on an eight gigabyte pi even so given that all recent raspberry pi models have a 64-bit processor staying with 32-bit is a little strange however it does mean that the recommended version of bullseye remains backwards compatible with all raspberry pi hardware and so to finish up i thought we'd spin up bullseye on the raspberry pi 1b and on the original raspberry pi zero 1w to start with the raspberry pi 1b from 2012 i've got it hooked up here as you can see and still this is in many respects the most exciting pie i love all the connectors on this ball i love the the journey it took so many of us on this is a still my my favorite pie in many respects anyway let's go across to the desktop where it's running bullseye as you can see and it does work it is a little sluggish because the raspberry pi 1b has got a single core processor running at 700 megahertz so not massively powerful but we can run the system there's a bit of a lag in the menu but it does work let's go to accessories and run up the task manager which you can see takes a little bit of time to come up it'll get there give it encouragement it's arrived look that's good isn't it and we can see that things are working okay we've got half a gigabyte of memory 512 megabytes of memory on this raspberry pi 1b the very early boards had 256 megabytes but this is the later one with half a gigabyte and it's things are running okay let's just run up also something else let's say run up say i don't know the calculator i'm picking quite small applications and even so they take a little bit of time to to come up it's going to get there in a second can we have the calculator please go on you can do it it's having a little think there we are the calculator and the task manager at the same point in time and i should of course point out that there is a light version of raspberry pi os bullseye without a desktop which is what you probably would want to run on this board if you're still using it for various purposes today so let's go across to the raspberry pi zero 1w which is a pie you very much might want to run bullseye on it's a very good low-cost projects board and if we go across to its desktop it is pretty much in terms of performance very similar to the raspberry pi 1b which is not much of a surprise because the raspberry pi zero 1w is very similar to a raspberry pi 1b except that its single chord processor is clocked at 1 gigahertz rather than 700 megahertz so let's just bring up task manager here see how rapid that comes up should be a little bit faster on the raspberry pi 1b i think that was seems to be working okay doesn't it there we are like that and we'll see how fast is the calculator launch on this we've got a new test how fast the calculator launches and uh again it can take a little bit of time isn't it you can run bullseye on these uh lower power pies but it's probably not the best thing to do and or in case you're wondering a raspberry pi zero one w does not have ethernet but i've got it connected up to a small hub to give me a network connection because i got so fed up waiting for wi-fi to sort out all the all the updates for the board so there we are we've tested out bullseye on lots of different versions of raspberry pi but these days i'd recommend running an earlier version of raspberry pi os if you want a graphical desktop on one of the earlier single core raspberry pi computers today is the 20th of november 2021 and i've now been testing out raspberry pi os bullseye on lots of different models of raspberry pi for about 10 days and from that testing i can report that it's a very solid a very stable update this said as you probably gathered i'm not terribly happy about the changes to the camera stack the camera driver and i understand why the changes have been made to make it easier for developers to work with a camera on the pi by making it open source but i also find it fairly extraordinary that right now the current edition of raspberry pi os the one you're offered in raspberry pi imager the one that's most easily available to download from the website the version of raspberry pi os that new users will end up using that version of raspberry pi os has got no python support for a camera at the current time now i understand that in computing you do get moments of inflection when you have to move to new technologies and you get issues of backwards compatibility and i guess that previously we haven't had one of these moments really with a raspberry pi a point where lots of older resources are simply not going to work so we've been quite lucky with the pie over a long period of time they've they've really focused on keeping backwards compatibility which is why perhaps i'm so surprised we haven't got that issue now we've now got this backers compatibility problem building up around camera use and i guess what i would have done and no one asked me and maybe hindsight is a wonderful thing but what i would have done with raspberry pi os bullseye would have been to call it something like raspberry pi os 2 to make it clearly distinct from raspberry pi os 1 which i know can't be supported forever in terms of debian updates but if we'd seen on the website raspberry pi os 2 raspberry pi os 1 saying things in the imager and it's been made clear that if you go for the new version there will be backwards compatibility issues that i think would have made the the transition and what's going on that route a little bit easier anyway that's my view i'm sure you've got views as well you already be typing them away down in the comments i look forward to reading all those inputs on this topic but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 84,613

Keywords: Raspberry Pi OS camera, Pi OS Bullseye, picamea, libcamera, Raspberry Pi camera issues, Raspberry Pi camera driver, Raspberry Pi YouTube playback, Bullseye camera problems, Bullseye camera issues, picamera Python, Python picamera, Python pi camera, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: 0kr_yS9OhLM

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021