Thursday, February 21, 2013

Updating your Raspberry Pi: Packages, Kernel, and Firmware. (Also, fixing omxplayer problems)

**Note, this is for Raspbian and other Debian based distros**

Also, this tends to fix Omxplayer when it won't work

I've found that almost all of the omxplayer problems are solved by properly updating your raspberry pi. Before you say "I already did that!", read below to make sure you have taken all of the steps since the kernel and the firmware require different commands.

Updating Packages

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

This updates the package list and upgrades all the packages. You can use the -y flag if you hate typing yes. After the kernel and all packages are upgraded, this command should show you:
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded

Updating the Kernel

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

This upgrades your linux kernel distribution. These are regularly released. You can see which version you have by running:
uname -a

Right now I have "Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+"

Updating the Firmware

sudo rpi-update

This upgrades the firmware as long as you have the Hexxeh script downloaded. It and instructions can be found here:
https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update

If you are having issues with video, make sure your memory split is set appropriately. I uses 128/128.
You can set this by editing /boot/config.txt and adding the line gpu_mem=128

If something is wrong, especially with omxplayer, make sure your packages, firmware, and kernel are all up to date. When they are, your problems will most likely be fixed.

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