Is there a plan to upgrade to a newer version of raspbian for the OFM OS image? Debian 10 long term support is ending soon and the age of the OS complicates installing certain packages.
The short answer is yes. There is more on the thread
Thanks. Will the next os image have a 64bit option?
Not yet - the main problem is that piwheels doesn’t build for ARM64, which might make a mess of the Python stuff (i.e. all the back-end code). It may be that ARM64 binaries are on PyPI and it’s a non-issue, but I’ve not had time to test.
If you were able to confirm that it’s not too painful to install the necessary Python dependencies on a 64 bit OS, and that the camera stack works correctly, it shouldn’t be a massive task to add a 64 bit build (or indeed to swap to 64 bit by default - it should work on everything newer than a Pi 3 I think).
I have been looking into it. The camera stack has some problems because the legacy system is no longer supported on ARM64 per https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=368493. Features from PiCameraX have to be ported over to the picamera2 package.
Sorry, I should have been clearer - I’m already using picamera2 (and in fact, happily, it doesn’t need any modifications). There’s one issue (a memory leak that stops the lens table updating) that currently requires a patch to python-libcamera but I’m hoping even that might be fixed eventually.
To save cluttering up this thread, I’ve started an issue here:
I can test that it’s possible to install everything - if you’re able to confirm that picamera2 works on the ARM64 version of Bookworm, then I should have an answer on whether everything else is OK in about an hour. Please do chime in on the issue thread linked above.
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