Rpi Imager 2 and Dec 2025 Raspberry Pi OS

I took the opportunity over the Christmas break to upgrade one of the Edge Cluster 12's to Raspberry Pi OS based upon Debian Trixie. They had been running the Debian Bookworm version of Raspberry Pi OS. Unfortunately I ran across a couple of problems.

There is a "design feature" with the Raspberry Pi Imager v2 where the Raspberry Pi foundation have removed the ability to customize images, so one cannot set the host name, user name, password or other settings. Well technically you can but only by writing JSON code for the Imager. I strongly recommend you keep Imager 1.9 if you need this ability.

Coupled with being unable to customize the image the Dec 2025 release of Raspberry Pi OS has changed some boot parameters so one cannot (even using Imager 1.9) customize the image.

For more information you can read the bug report on Github HERE where the developer has closed the bug as "won't fix".

Despite the above I managed (after a lot of attempts) to get 12 new micro SD cards imaged and replaced the existing ones in one of the Edge Cluster 12's. Those 12 Pi4's have been running Einstein@home work since. The Pi5's were upgraded soon after the Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian Trixie became available. That leaves me with another Edge Cluster 12 (ie 12 x Pi4s) to upgrade.

My current install process is to use Imager 1.9 and the Oct 2025 release to image the SD card. Once done and the Pi has booted do an "apt update" and "apt upgrade -y" to get it up to date.

 

Running slowly

Hot weather has returned so the farm is working in between.

As well as the weather the Raspberry Pi foundation released Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian Trixie on the 1st of October. I have been updating the support nodes to see how things work out. The only major change is the swap space is now 2GB and they're using zram for swap. I've updated all the Pi5's but have yet to update the Pi4 compute nodes.

Another quirk I found was the "lite" version doesn't include nfs-common so after getting stuck I found out you have to install it before you can use an nfs mounted drive. The full version or Raspberry Pi OS (ie with a desktop) includes nfs-common.

September update

The farm is still running 24/7. We had a few hot days earlier in the week, where I had the farm idle (ie running but not doing any tasks). 

Asteroids@home seems to have disappeared so I removed it from all the Pis.

Debian trixie was released and I am waiting for an updated version of Raspberry Pi OS. I've upgraded all my x86-64 machines.

I purchased more micro SD cards, the Sandisk high endurance ones so I should be ready to replace all of them once Raspberry Pi OS is available. The shop had 256GB cards available but the price was too high and I don't think I need that much disk space. I settled for 32GB cards instead being the cheapest of the high endurance variety. Most of my Pi's have older Sandisk Ultra 16GB cards at the moment which seem to last around a year to 18 months before I have to replace them.

 

Still crunching Aug 2025

Marks Rpi Cluster is continuing to run 24/7 and getting through work. Its doing Einstein. Asteroids still haven't re-applied their Pi optimizations so I am sticking with Einstein for the time being.

 

Rpi OS based on Debian trixie

Debian Trixie is due for release on the 9th of August. Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian. The Rpi foundation said that they aren't likely to have any major updates until they upgrade to Trixie. Last time Debian updated (approx 2 years ago) there was quite a few months before Raspberry Pi OS caught up so hopefully it won't take too long this time.

Most of my Pi's run headless (no screen and keyboard) and I run the "lite" version which doesn't include a desktop environment so I probably won't see much change, although there are a lot of improvements to apt, the package manager that Debian use.

I will be trying it on a Pi5 first to see what works and what has changed before imaging a bunch of SD cards. To do the EC12's I will have to open up each one to get to the SD card slots on each Pi. I do a clean install from scratch rather than attempting to upgrade from the previous OS. Earlier versions of Rpi OS didn't officially support upgrading the operating system.