Raspbian 2018-03-13 image is now available to download

Mar 14, 2018 16:30 GMT  ·  By

The Raspberry Pi Foundation released today a new build of its Debian-based Raspbian operating system for Raspberry Pi single-board computer with dozens of improvements, updated components, and other enhancements.

Probably the most important feature of the new Raspbian release, which is powered by the Linux 4.9.80 LTS kernel, is support for the recently launched Raspberry Pi 3 B+ single-board computer that Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled this morning in celebration of the Pi Day.

However, Wi-Fi is disabled by default for the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ model due to the wireless regulatory domain not being set. To set the domain, you need to set the 'country=' attribute in the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file to a country code closer to ISO 3166 alpha2.

Raspberry Pi Foundation said that the domain can also be set through the Raspberry Pi Configuration (rc_gui) graphical tool or the raspi-config command-line utility. The default wireless regulatory domain is currently unset in the Raspbian 2018-03-13 release.

Another interesting change of this new Raspbian snapshot is the implementation of support for different screen sizes and resolutions into the Xfce-based PIXEL desktop environment. This feature offers multiple present options, which can be set through the Appearance Settings  panel and the PIXEL doubling option in Raspberry Pi Configuration.

Updated apps and Wi-Fi firmware, new packages

Other noteworthy improvements of the Raspbian 2018-03-13 release include support for Bluetooth LE HID devices in the Bluetooth plugin, support for 5G-compatible Access Points (APs) in the network plugin, better support for pi-top devices, as well as up-to-date dhcpcd networking plugin and Bluez ALSA service.

It should be noted that the Bluez ALSA service now starts automatically on boot. Several components were updated in this release, including Thonny to version 2.1.16, Pygame Zero to version 1.2.post1, and Adobe PepperFlash player to latest 29.0.0.113 release. Also, the brcmfmac43455-sdio 7.45.154 and brcmfmac43430-sdio 7.45.98.38 Wi-Fi firmware were included.

Some new packages are present as well, among which we can mention policykit-1, obconf, python-buttonshim, python3-buttonshim, python-unicornhathd, python3-unicornhathd, python-pantilthat, and python3-pantilthat, and the default PIXEL theme and icons received smaller design changes.

In terms of bug fixes, Raspbian 2018-03-13 address the deceptive window resize handles and makes the Scratch 2 remote GPIO state block to work correctly. You can download the Raspbian 2018-03-13 image right now through our website if you want to run it on your Raspberry Pi single-board computer.