Is Pi-Star dead? No releases for 12 months

[G1HUL]

Is Pi-Star no longer in active development?

4.3 beta was released 12 months ago, but there have been no further updates of anything since then.

[M1DNS]

What do you want to see added?

The base vers. of software/ modes thats used in pistar hasnt been changed much for months.

The overnight updates bring you host changes and background tweaks to keep relevant, so agn ill ask what do you want to see added??

Adding stuff, just for the sake of adding stuff adds little value to something that was designed as a setup/ config interface for mmdvmhost.


Sent via smoke signals using my SM-G935F

[G1HUL]

Not looking for specific fucntionality, just that 4.1 and 4.2 are now on versions of Pi OS that are EOL (the Pi updater needs to be manually changed to pint to an archive to even run).

4.3 was being rebased onto Bookworm, but that was 12 months ago with no releases since.

What background tweaks? Nothing in any logs I can see, that last changelog entry was 16-Feb-2024.

[G8SEZ]

Allowing Bookworm OS updates breaks things fairly well, I was wondering if this could be looked at but I appreciate that the devs are busy people.

[KN6OLC]

Not looking for specific fucntionality, just that 4.1 and 4.2 are now on versions of Pi OS that are EOL (the Pi updater needs to be manually changed to pint to an archive to even run).

4.3 was being rebased onto Bookworm, but that was 12 months ago with no releases since.

What background tweaks? Nothing in any logs I can see, that last changelog entry was 16-Feb-2024.

Just for the sake of security, the publicly released version should be running the current (or at least recent) base OS version. Having pi-stars sitting on people's home networks with a ton of vulnerabilities is not good. Especially when the built-in update button isn't able to effectively patch the base OS. The average pi-star user is not a Linux expert, so very few are going to adjust apt config files to fix broken URLs.

[EA3W]

Hello everyone:
The translations are missing many sentences that cannot be translated because they are not in the original file.

Greetings from Catalonia!

[K9DJN]

Allowing Bookworm OS updates breaks things fairly well, I was wondering if this could be looked at but I appreciate that the devs are busy people.

I can agree with that. The beta image (4.3.0) works pretty well before you do any OS updates. Afterwards, in my case, the hat board I am using no longer is recognized by PiStar. Going back to the 4.2.1 image fixes that. I also agree that the bullseye release is getting stale, but at least it's possible to still get some updates. Such is the nature of FOSS.

Doug
K9DJN

[KD8DVR]

What do you want to see added?

The base vers. of software/ modes thats used in pistar hasnt been changed much for months.

The overnight updates bring you host changes and background tweaks to keep relevant, so agn ill ask what do you want to see added??

Adding stuff, just for the sake of adding stuff adds little value to something that was designed as a setup/ config interface for mmdvmhost.

How about making the beta *work*? Ince installed and updated, DMR no longer works. There is lots of discussion about this.

[DW7GDL]

Just for the sake of security, the publicly released version should be running the current (or at least recent) base OS version. Having pi-stars sitting on people's home networks with a ton of vulnerabilities is not good. Especially when the built-in update button isn't able to effectively patch the base OS. The average pi-star user is not a Linux expert, so very few are going to adjust apt config files to fix broken URLs.

It is. The current stable 4.21 version runs on Debian Oldstable (Bullseye) which is still on long term support, getting security patches, until 31 August 2026 and extended LTS until 30 June 2031. That's when Bullseye will finally be totally obsolete and when Pi-Star will need to be running the current stable version of Debian, or at least the current oldstable version, be it Bookworm or, by then, probably Trixie will be the latest Debian stable release. So relax, there's plenty of time.

FYI I just got through SSHing into my hotspot and running sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade and got no errors You have to make sure that the date and time are current for this to work or else you'll get errors saying the repository won't be available for X more days or something like that. To check the hotspot's current date and time SSH into it and run

Code: Select all

date

. To set it and make it current run

Code: Select all

sudo date -s "DD MMM YYYY HH:MM:SS"

where DD is the two digit day, MMM is the three letter abbreviation for the name of the month, YYYY is the year, HH:MM:SS are the hour, minutes and seconds. For example:

Code: Select all

sudo date -s "24 FEB 2025 01:30:55"

[KN6OLC]

Just for the sake of security, the publicly released version should be running the current (or at least recent) base OS version. Having pi-stars sitting on people's home networks with a ton of vulnerabilities is not good. Especially when the built-in update button isn't able to effectively patch the base OS. The average pi-star user is not a Linux expert, so very few are going to adjust apt config files to fix broken URLs.

It is. The current stable 4.21 version runs on Debian Oldstable (Bullseye) which is still on long term support, getting security patches, until 31 August 2026 and extended LTS until 30 June 2031. That's when Bullseye will finally be totally obsolete and when Pi-Star will need to be running the current stable version of Debian, or at least the current oldstable version, be it Bookworm or, by then, probably Trixie will be the latest Debian stable release. So relax, there's plenty of time.

FYI I just got through SSHing into my hotspot and running sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade and got no errors You have to make sure that the date and time are current for this to work or else you'll get errors saying the repository won't be available for X more days or something like that. To check the hotspot's current date and time SSH into it and run

Code: Select all

date

. To set it and make it current run

Code: Select all

sudo date -s "DD MMM YYYY HH:MM:SS"

where DD is the two digit day, MMM is the three letter abbreviation for the name of the month, YYYY is the year, HH:MM:SS are the hour, minutes and seconds. For example:

Code: Select all

sudo date -s "24 FEB 2025 01:30:55"

Did you manually update your repo URLs? At least for me, apt stopped working, and required manual correction.

That’s my point. The average pi-star user doesn’t know how to SSH or edit config files. The web GUI includes an update button, but that’s non-functional. The main download should include a functional update mechanism.