Skip to content

Release Notes

May 2025 (version 9.13)

Overview

The May 25th, 2025 release of DietPi v9.13 enforces the change of the default password for users and software installs, and comes with a lot of upgrades and fixes for various SBC kernels and bootloaders.

Secure SBC Repair & Protection

"Secure SBC Repair & Protection" by ChatGPT/DALL·E

Removed software

  • DietPi-Software | Google AIY The Google AIY Voice Kit is not produced or sold anymore, and the related software repositories have been archived years ago. Furthermore we used install steps which were deprecated even years before the repository has been archived, and no sample to test whether it still works or not. If you still have an instance running, or aim to still try to get one running, here are uninstall instructions, as well as a link to the latest install instructions: MichaIng/DietPi!7533
  • DietPi-Software | Mycroft AI As we state on our docs since over a year, Mycroft AI has shut down: https://mailchi.mp/cccbfdd464c7/mycroft-is-winding-down-its-operations-6268807. There are two forks we might want to implement as alternative: OpenVoiceOS and Neon AI. Let us know if you are interested, and we will help with the implementation. If you have a left dysfunctional Mycroft AI instance on your DietPi system, here is how to uninstall it manually: MichaIng/DietPi!7534

Enhancements

  • General DietPi will now enforce the change of the default user and software passwords for security reasons. This also applies retrospectively during DietPi update, showing a prompt, if one of the two default users or dietpi-software still use the default password. However, the password set in dietpi.txt will now be applied in any case (before it is removed from that file), also without AUTO_SETUP_AUTOMATED=1, and if it does not equal the default, no further prompt will be shown.
  • General DietPi images will now ship without unzip, 7zip and bzip2 compression tools pre-installed. Our code has been adjusted to install those automatically if needed. Let us know if you think these are manually used too often to be missing.
  • Orange Pi 3B Added support for the PWM fan connector to mainline kernel builds. Many thanks to @Vyacheslav-S for reporting this missing kernel feature: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/issues/7490#issuecomment-2829426560
  • Radxa ZERO 3 An upgrade to the Linux 6.1 based vendor kernel will be offered on DietPi update and implemented into new images from now on. Among other enhancements, this enables HDMI audio. Many thanks to @simpL3gr for reporting the missing HDMI audio functionality: MichaIng/DietPi#7520
  • ASUS Tinker Board 2 Resolved an issue where the onboard Ethernet MAC address changed each boot with the new Linux 6.12 based kernel. Many thanks to @briney83 for reporting this issue: MichaIng/DietPi#7522
  • Virtual Machines Our future VM images will ship with initramfs-tools instead of tiny-initramfs. The latter generates much smaller initramfs images (~1 MiB vs ~35 MiB), which is partly achieved by adding only those kernel modules actually used by the host. This auto-detection cannot work when generating images via container on other host systems, hence we maintained a small list of block device controller drivers known to be used by the virtualisers we provide images for. The default controller can however be changed, which then renders the image unbootable, and a static list of controller drivers reduces the compatibility of our VM images. For our Clonezilla-based installer images it causes the additional issue that Clonezilla aims to regenerate the initramfs via update-initramfs command, which would add possibly missing drivers, but tiny-initramfs provides update-tirfs instead. Furthermore, while Debian still maintains a tiny-initramfs package, there is actually no upstream development since years. We love small images with low disk I/O (for initramfs image generation), but sadly the downsides have become too large to keep using tiny-initramfs. Many thanks to @TheLinuxGuy for reporting the issue with Clonezilla, and an in turn unbootable VM image on Proxmox: MichaIng/DietPi#7468
  • DietPi-Tools | First run setup/DietPi-Config The keyboard layout dialogue has been simplified. It shows a single list of supported layouts now, instead of the multiple steps to select keyboard model, navigate back and forth for the correct language, layout, and layout variant, and additional options like AltGr and compose key functions, presented by dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration. If additional options are needed, it is still possible to start the extended dialogue by selecting “Advanced” in our simplified menu. Else it will select the genetic 105-key keyboard model, default layout variant and options, which will work fine for most users, including most laptop keyboards, with and without keypad. The goal is to simplify and speed up the first run setup, as well as to unify the code sections which trigger a keyboard configuration.
  • DietPi-Software | Gitea This software option has been enabled for RISC-V systems, supported since v1.23.8.

Bug fixes

  • Orange Pi 3B v1.1 Resolved an issue where Ethernet did not work with the old revision of this board, when booting with the vendor bootloader from SPI. Many thanks to @iivailo for reporting this issue, and @Kwiboo for valuable insights based on ROCK 3B, which suffered from the same issue: MichaIng/DietPi#7490, https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/issues/7327#issuecomment-2589181487
  • Orange Pi Zero 3/2W Resolved an issue where, especially on the 1 GB RAM variant, the RAM was sometimes detected with doubled size, leading to system crashes when it tries to write to these non-existing addresses. Many thanks to @bigross8 and others for reporting this issue: MichaIng/DietPi#7242
  • DietPi-Tools | DietPi-Set_CPU Resolved an issue where on certain rare systems, the maximum CPU scheduling frequency was set to the min possible frequency, or the other way round, if not explicitly set differently. Many thanks to @fat-pi2 and @waym for reporting this issue: https://dietpi.com/forum/t/6560
  • DietPi-Tools | DietPi-Imager Resolved an issue where the last partition of the input system was not detected correctly, when running the dietpi-imager on a Debian Bullseye host, or one with comparable lsblk/util-linux version. Its size was hence not reduced as intended, leading to a huge output image. Many thanks to @DrCWO for reporting this issue: MichaIng/DietPi#7527
  • DietPi-Tools | DietPi-Display Resolved an issue where manually disabled displays did never show up again in the menu after a reboot, until the related kernel command-line argument is removed or adjusted manually. This is since disabled displays usually show up as “disconnected” in the sysfs API, which is then skipped by the tool. In addition to the sysfs API, kernel command-line configs are now checked for video (display) entries, and those in case shown in the tool. That way it is possible to always re-enable displays, which have been disabled with the tool.
  • DietPi-Tools | DietPi-Display Resolved an issue where the extlinux config was not parsed correctly, which could lead to duplicate kernel command-line arguments, when changing settings for the same display multiple times.
  • DietPi-Software | RPi.GPIO Resolved a regression where the installation failed on Bullseye systems as the python3-rpi-lgpio compatibility package exists since Bookworm only.
  • DietPi-Software | fish Resolved a syntax error on uninstall, and assured that all users who use fish as login shell are altered to use bash instead. Many thanks to @echtfrank for reporting these issues: MichaIng/DietPi#7500
  • DietPi-Software | Home Assistant Resolved an issue where latest HA could not be installed/updated due to a raised Python requirement on v3.13.2. Many thanks to @whyisthisbroken and @Yougoshatenshi for reporting this issue: MichaIng/DietPi#7525
  • DietPi-Software | Redis Solved a startup warning that memory overcommit should be enabled. This is applied for fresh Redis installs as well as via DietPi update for existing instances.
  • DietPi-Software Resolved an old visual glitch in the “Browse software” menu, where cryptic characters showed up the end of some checkbox lines, worsening when scrolling up and down. The underlying reason is a 199 bytes limit for whiptail checkbox and menu lines, which splits also multi-byte characters apart, like the “box drawing” horizontal line used for category delimiter lines by some of our menus. And since those line characters are 3-bytes in size, the 199 bytes limit can be reached as well in dialogues with only 96 characters width, like our current software menu. We use now regular 1-byte size dashes in category delimiter lines, to never reach the 199 bytes limit.

As always, many smaller code performance and stability improvements, visual and spelling fixes have been done, too much to list all of them here. Check out all code changes of this release on GitHub: MichaIng/DietPi!7540