A few people have wanted to know how to turn on the screensaver in Raspbian with PIXEL. The default Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian with PIXEL) doesn't ship with a screensaver. Although it does feature a range of cool desktop images.

What you might have missed, is that The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a selection of new wallpapers and a screensaver for the Raspbian with PIXEL operating system.

The screensavers are particularly gorgeous, based on aerial photography from Cambridge, the home of Raspberry Pi.

The Cambridge Theme. new Screensaver and Desktop images

The optional new look for Raspbian is based on the city of Cambridge, UK.

“The connection between Raspberry Pi and Cambridge runs a lot deeper than mere geography,” says Simon Long, UX engineer.

Simon explains: “Raspberry Pi was founded with the aim of increasing the number of applicants to study computer science at the University of Cambridge. The processor core which powers the Raspberry Pi was developed in the city by ARM, the hugely successful microprocessor company which itself grew out of Acorn, one of the original pioneers of the 1980s home computer revolution, and another Cambridge success story.”

A few months ago, Eben Upton and Simon were looking at the beautiful city flyover videos that Apple offers as screensavers on the Apple TV. “We thought that it would be great if we could do something similar for Raspbian, with Cambridge as the subject,” recalls Simon. “So we enlisted the help of Cambridge Filmworks.”

Cambridge Filmworks specialises in filming with drones, and they put together a video showing the best of Cambridge’s architecture, recorded from the air.

The new screensaver is gorgeous. Once installed, you access it via Menu > Preferences > Screensaver.

To get the new theme, first update the Raspbian package list in Terminal:

sudo apt-get update

To install the wallpapers:

sudo apt-get install cantab-wallpaper

To install the screensaver:

sudo apt-get install cantab-screensaver

To install both:

sudo apt-get install cantab-theme