A new release of the Raspberry Pi OS arrived last week. As usual, the release announcement[1] gives a general overview of the most important additions and improvements, and the release notes[2] contain a lot more detail. In addition to the usual accumulation of updates since the previous release (August 2020), there has been some significant new hardware such as the Raspberry Pi 400 and the Raspberry Pi 4 Case Fan, which needed new support in the operating system: it was getting to the point where building a new Raspberry Pi SD card required more time on updates than it did for actually downloading the OS image and copying it to the card.
You can update an existing system to the new level with just a few package management commands:
- sudo apt purge bluealsa pimixer
- sudo apt update
- sudo apt dist-upgrade
- sudo sudo apt install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
- rm -f ~/.asoundrc
After these commands, reboot the system.
Creating a new SD card requires a bit more effort, and a bit of thought about content and size of the three different versions of Raspberry Pi OS currently available. The new images are available from the Raspberry Pi Downloads[3] page, of course. As has always been the case, all of the images are compatible with all of the different Raspberry Pi systems, from the original Model A and Model B through to the latest Pi 400 keyboard, and including all of the Pi Zero variants.
- Raspberry Pi OS with desktop[4]: This is the "basic GUI" version. It includes the Pixel desktop Graphical User Interface; some basic software, utilities and applications that you would expect with a Linux system, such as a web browser (Chromium), VLC media player, text editor,