14 DAY TRIAL // The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced today the release of a new version of the official operating system for the tiny Raspberry Pi single-board computers to support their latest Raspberry Pi 4 release.
With the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC series, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new version of Raspbian OS, the official Raspberry Pi operating system based on the popular Debian GNU/Linux distribution. This release adds numerous new features and improvements, but the biggest change is that it supports the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer.
Another major change in the new Raspbian OS release is that the entire operating system has been rebased on the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series, due for release next month on July 6th. This means that there are numerous updated components included in Raspbian 2019-06-20, along with lots of bug fixes and improvements.
"To support Raspberry Pi 4, we are shipping a radically overhauled operating system, based on the forthcoming Debian 10 Buster release," said Eben Upton, Chief Executive Raspberry Pi. "This brings numerous behind-the-scenes technical improvements, along with an extensively modernised user interface, and updated applications including the Chromium 74 web browser."
Here's what's new in Raspbian 2019-06-20
Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.19.50 kernel, the Raspbian 2019-06-20 release implements the FKMS OpenGL desktop graphics driver and xcompmgr compositing window manager for Raspberry Pi 4 boards, along with new video output options for Raspberry Pi 4's 4K capabilities in the Raspberry Pi Configuration, and a new Screen Configuration utility for the FKMS driver.
Raspbian 2019-06-20 also comes with a new PiXflat UI desktop theme, a new CPU temperature gauge plugin, a new boot partition size of 256MB, as well as various other refinements to the default PIXEL desktop environment developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Moreover, Raspbian OS now supports independent settings for dual-monitor configurations and blocks the on-board 5GHz Wi-Fi by default through rfkill.
To unblock 5GHz Wi-Fi, users will have to either run the "rfkill unblock wifi" command in a terminal emulator, set the Wi-Fi country in the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool, or in the Network Settings applet, set a locale in the first run wizard, or provide a wpa_supplicant.conf configuration file through the boot partition.
Updated components include the Chromium 74.0.3729.157 web browser, Adobe Flash Player 32.0.0.207 plugin, and OpenJDK 11 as default Java runtime environment. You can download Raspbian 2019-06-20 right now through our free Linux software portal. Existing users are recommended to reinstall Raspbian rather than upgrading to ensure a fully working OS due to the rebase on Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster".
