Pi OS Questions

Technical Support
1

So looking at a previous post, I cranked up my Shake device in 2022. Lots of things have changed with Raspberry Pi (the company) in those 4 and more years. Does the Pi need to be updated by using the standard
Sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

I was pretty ignorant of Pi’s, the OS at the time I built my Shake but it has run faithfully with almost no attention since I turned it on…

  • Would I benefit from changing out the Pi 4 to a Pi 5 with the Pi5 also using an NVME. I have all the hardware already so the cost factor does not factor into the question
    With a Pi5 I can put the OS on the NVMe card rather than relying on the micro-SD card

  • Where can I find information about a generic wired network setup for it to function best?

When I first installed my Shake, I had trouble getting the device connected to the internet. I did get it connected but I have a rat’s nest of ethernet cables and power cables I want to clean up. So I could do this all together.

Sort of unrelated but I make these devices called a MagicMirror. Raspberry Pi Company changed from some X11 component to this thing called Wayland. I’m not a programmer so all I know is that this change has to do with how the display window frame works within the Pi OS. Are you all going to have to address that issue also or is how you display your information on screen done differently?

2

Hello yellowfin,

Regarding the update, not really. All that’s needed for the Shake to work is automatically included in our OS package and any future upgrade we then release.

However, if you need to update some packages because of the work you’re doing, you can do so. In the end, if the update breaks something, it’s easy to go back to the original OS by downloading and installing it anew. So you can “play” with things as much as you want.

(We recommend keeping one microSD always “natural”, with no modifications, and using a second one for any project. With this, reverting back becomes as simple as swapping the two microSD cards)

Regarding the update from Pi4 to Pi5, this is instead not recommended, as we do not currently (nor plan to) support any of the model revisions of the Raspberry Pi 5 board.

What do you mean by “generic wired setup”? Something regarding IP addresses or something different?

Onto the Wayland Pi OS upgrade, this mainly affects systems that use a desktop environment with application windows. It controls how window frames, input, and desktop graphics are handled, so projects that depend on the Raspberry Pi OS GUI do need to account for it.

Shake OS is different. It’s based on Debian 10 (Buster) release and does not use the Raspberry Pi desktop stack, X11, or Wayland at all. Our display and data access are handled through web interfaces and background services rather than framed GUI windows, so changes in newer Raspberry Pi OS releases don’t directly affect how Shake OS works or displays information.

If you can find a way to display a web page on the Magic Mirror, then you should be able to display the Shake OS dashboard, theoretically.