The DietPi team has announced the release of DietPi 9.12, a distribution designed for single-board PCs and RISC-V platforms such as Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Nanopi, Bananapi, Beaglebone Black, Rock64, Rock Pi, Quartz64, Pine64, Asus Tinker, Odroid, and Visionfive 2. It is available in images for more than 50 boards, including options for creating virtual machines and traditional PCs based on the X86_64 architecture. DietPi’s builds are known for their small size, averaging around 130 MB, in comparison to other OS options like Raspberry Pi OS and Armbian. The distribution’s tools and maintenance mechanisms are distributed under the GPLv2 license.
Designed for minimal resource usage, DietPi includes a range of proprietary utilities such as the DietPi-Software app interface, DietPi-Config configurator, DietPi-Backup backup solution, DietPi-Ramlog for temporary logs, priority installation for DietPi-Services, and a DietPi-Update system. These utilities offer a console user interface with menu navigation and dialogs based on Whiptail. Full automation of the installation process is also supported, allowing for user-independent setups.
Notable changes in the latest release include:
- Addition of the fish package to the DietPi-Software interface as an alternative shell option.
- Use of Sensible-Editor Call instead of Nano editor for opening text files, allowing users to choose their preferred editor.
- Integration of backup conservation on external hosts through SSHFS in dietpi-backup.
- Update of the amiberry Amiga emulator to version 7 with an AMIB