DietPi is a minimal and highly optimized Debian-based Linux distribution
The release of the new version of DietPi 9.0 was recently announced , which marks as obsolete the builds generated with Debian 1.0 and from this release the minimum supported builds are with Debian 11, it also includes improvements to support for the Raspberry Pi 5 and other things.
For those unfamiliar with DietPi, it 's a Debian-based operating system designed for the Raspberry Pi . It focuses on reducing unnecessary components to provide an elegant and lightweight operating system that can still handle heavy lifting.
Main news of DietPi 9.0
In this new version of DietPi 9.0, support for Debian 10-based builds has been removed (builds based on Debian 11 repositories have been updated), so the minimum supported Debian version has now been raised to Bullseye and Buster systems will be automatically migrated to a dedicated build.
Furthermore, the minimum DietPi version required to support direct upgrades to DietPi 9.0 has been raised to DietPi 7.0. Older systems will undergo a two-stage process: first, they will be upgraded to DietPi 8.25 via a separate branch, and then to DietPi 9.0 via the main branch, provided they meet the Debian version requirement.
Another new feature of this version is the creation of a new image for the Orange Pi Zero 3 board with 1.5 GB of RAM . Furthermore, improvements have been made to Raspberry Pi 5 support, as the firmware migration script for testing has been reworked to allow the selection/deselection of optional kernel packages, instead of installing them all.
It is also noted that packages with the Moonlight game client have been added to Debian 12-based builds and the Logitech Media Server for Bookworm and Trixie has been re-enabled , now compiling from nightly builds instead of releases.
Other notable changes in this new version include:
- In the DietPi-Banner tool, disk usage is now displayed instead of free space, including total disk size and percentage used.
- Updated build dependencies for ARM and RISC-V, and switched to the recent PyPI preview instead of pulling from the dev branch repositories.
- Instead of free drive space, the screen saver shows the drive size and used space as a percentage.
- Resolved an issue where built-in WiFi and Bluetooth were not working on Orange Pi 3B because the related kernel module was not loaded.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about this , you can find the details at the following link.
How to install DietPi?
For those interested in trying this operating system on their Raspberry Pi, they should go to its official website, which they can visit from the following link.
Once you have obtained the compressed image, you can write it to your Raspberry Pi's Micro SD card using Etcher or directly with the dd command from the terminal.
Once the image is saved to your Micro SD card, you can make some adjustments before initializing the system. This step is optional if you want your DietPi to connect via Wi-Fi; if you're connecting via LAN, skip this step.
To do this, on our computer we will navigate inside the SD card and look for the file called dietpi.txt and open it with the text editor of your choice.
Within the file, we will look for the lines that contain the following:
WIFI_SSID [0] = y WIFI_KEY [0] =
Here we will enter our network name (SSID) and its password (Key) , resulting in the lines we are looking for looking something like this:
WIFI_SSID [0] = “elnombre-de-tu-red”
WIFI_KEY [0] =“tu-contraseña”
We saved and closed the file and now you need to put the microSD card in your Pi, plug in your keyboard and mouse as well as your Raspberry Pi power supply.
Once the system has started, you can access it with:
- username = root
- password = dietpi
Here the system is going to be updated and it will reboot at the end of this. After restarting again they log in again.
Now, to install the tool package, simply type:
dietpi-launcher