With the Contents file downloaded, apt then parses it to determine what package versions are available. On my Pi 400, that's Contents-arm64.gz on older 32-bit Pis, it would be Contents-armhf.gz. However, this is, in Pi founder Eben Upton's words, "pretty thin gruel." The only tool touching that Web server is apt itself, and it does not reveal anything about the user's system-it simply checks to see what's in /repos/vscode/dists/stable and downloads the appropriate Contents-*.gz file for your system architecture. If you squint your eyes really tight and hold your mouth just right, you might argue that this constitutes "telemetry"-you touched a Microsoft server, right? Advertisement ![]() With Microsoft's repository for VS Code installed on the system, each time the system checks for updates, the server at gets queries to see if there are any changes to the packages it makes available. But the difficulty of getting started with writing code is another of those potential roadblocks-so making it easier to install a very popular IDE is very much in line with the Pi Foundation's core mission. The first of those roadblocks, arguably, was of course price-it's difficult to impossible to get a full-featured, general-purpose computing device for less than it costs to buy a Pi. We can already hear some users grumbling that it wasn't that hard to install VS Code the old way-and to them, we'd like to point out that the primary purpose of the Raspberry Pi foundation isn't to provide advanced users with cheap toys, it's to facilitate computer education by removing roadblocks. This is a more Unix-like way to do things, it's considerably simpler, and it can be far more easily performed without a GUI available as well. Once that was done, you'd need to authenticate as a privileged user, and finally the package (and its dependencies) would begin to download and install themselves on your Pi.īy contrast, now that the code repo (and its GPG key) are installed on the system, a user can simply sudo apt install code. Once you had downloaded the hopefully correct version of the Visual Studio Code package, you then needed to locate the downloaded package and execute it-typically, by finding it in File Manager and double-clicking it. You needed to open up a Web browser, go to the Visual Studio Code download page, and navigate a few more minor hurdles-for example, you need to know that your system wants deb files and not rpm, that your Pi needs ARM architecture packages, and finally whether those packages should be ARM or ARM64 (which is different for different models of Pi). Prior to the Pi Foundation adding Microsoft's repo for Visual Studio Code to the list, installing that IDE required some extra, and rather non-Linux-y, steps. Advertisementįinally, performing apt policy code confirms that Visual Studio Code was not actually installed on my system-it's just easier to install (and update!) now, since its parent repository is part of my sources list, along with the GPG code verifying the contents of that repository. If we look at the actual content of, we can see it only contains three packages: code, code-exploration, and code-insiders. That file added a single repository to my sources:, with branches stable and main. To make a long story short, the only change to my package management was the addition of a single file, /etc/apt//vscode.list. With backup in place, I did apt update apt upgrade -y to apply all the upgrades to my system that it had missed since it was last running Pi OS. Next, I made a copy of the entire /etc/apt/ directory on my Pi 400, with tar czvf ~/ /etc/apt. Equally luckily, the Raspberry Pi 400 is almost ideally suited to distro-hopping-all I needed to do to get a pre-update version of Pi OS running was to power my Pi off, swap SD cards from the Ubuntu card I had been using to my old Pi OS card, and then fire it back up. ![]() ![]() Luckily, my own Raspberry Pi 400 was running Ubuntu, not Raspberry Pi OS, which made it easy to switch back to see what changes occurred in the system.
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