Raspberry Pi Raspbian 64-bit OS Upgrade

5 min readAug 31, 2020

64-bit Raspbian OS !! Yes, you heard me right. This is the second hot news that the Raspberry Pi organization has thrown into the Raspberry Pi community during this covid-19 crisis.

Raspberry Pi organization has come up with this one more news after launching Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB RAM version. There are several exciting upgrades in this new version.

In this tutorial, we will discuss what update we will get in this new 64-bit Raspbian OS and how to install a 64-bit Raspbian OS on your 8GB Raspberry Pi board.

What are the new things in Raspberry Pi 64 bit?

As per my knowledge raspberry pi launched 32bit OS back in 2012. But it never considered as the perfect replacement for a PC.

Sure, you will be able to play games and do some office work on it but people like me don’t like to do that with 512GB or 1GB RAM.

But the recent update of Raspberry Pi 4 has changed the game by offering multithreading and multiprocessing like features.

Earlier Raspberry Pi OS was 32 bit which never allowed applications to run which were trying to consume 4 GB RAM. This is why the Raspberry Pi organization worked on the Raspberry Pi OS and they came up with the upgraded OS which is a 64 bit OS.

Which application you will get in the new Raspberry PI 64Bit OS?

In this advanced OS, they have added some applications such as bookshelf, magnifier, and user research.

These applications are going to help you in many ways. Let’s discuss what they are and how you can use them to make things less complicated.

Bookshelf Application

Many of us know that raspberry pi has its own page. On which they publish the latest and latest news related to their project. Apart from this, they also publish a wide range of books and magazines related to their latest products.

In this update of Raspberry Pi OS, they have added a bookshelf application, through which you can download all those things in a PDF form and I’m sure you are going to like this application. This application will not only keep you up-to-date on things related to Raspberry Pi but will also help in increasing your knowledge.

Bottom line :

Some people have reported that they get a “disk full” error when using this application and the solution to this problem is running “sudo app update” followed by the “sudo app upgrade” command on the terminal. This will give you a stable version and you will not see that error on your screen again.

Magnifier Application

This is a new application that the Raspberry Group has added to their new Raspberry Pi OS. If you ask me the necessity of this, I would say that it is the right thing they have done there. This function will allow you to see every detail of the application that appears on your Raspberry Pi desktop. This feature provides you magnifying glasses.

How to install and use Magnifier in Raspberry Pi 64Bit OS?

The installation of this application is very simple, launch the recommended application in the new image and select Magnifier under Universal Access. Once it is installed, reboot the Raspberry Pi and the Magnifier is now installed on your Raspberry Pi desktop. After the reboot, you would see the magnifying icon on the right-hand side of the taskbar.

How To use Magnifier?

After installing the magnifier on your Raspberry Pi OS, you will see the the magnifying icon on the right side of the taskbar. To enable the magnifier on your screen, right-click on that icon or if you are allergic to a mouse like me, you can type the CTR + ALT + M keyboard shortcut to enable the magnifier and to disable it, right-click on the icon again or re-enter the same keyboard shortcut.

User Research Application

This is another application, which you will see in the new Raspberry Pi OS update. We are using Raspberry Pi for various applications and sometimes we cross boundaries and do things that are new for Raspberry Pi. Sometimes we get success while doing such things and sometimes we fail. This is because Raspberry Pi does not know how you want to play with it.

Understanding this situation of users, Raspberry Pi has decided to collect data of projects that users are doing using the Raspberry PI.

In this way, they are trying to understand the needs of users and make Raspberry Pi more user-oriented.