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The Raspberry Pi Foundation released today a new version of their Raspberry Pi Imager flashing utility that comes with an advanced options panel to let you change additional OS features.
Raspberry Pi Imager 1.6 is out now as the latest and greatest version of Raspberry Pi’s official flashing utility, which can be used on all major operating systems to write OS images designed for the tiny Raspberry Pi computer.
The biggest new feature in this release is the implementation of a hidden advanced options panel, which can only be accessed using a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+X). This advanced options panel lets you control additional features for the operating system you’re about to flash on an SD card or SSD drive.
For example, you can disable overscan, enable SSH (Secure Shell), set a default hostname, configure Wi-Fi, or set locale settings like timezone and keyboard layout. You also have the option to opt in for using all of these advanced options for the current session or for future sessions.
In addition, the advanced options panel lets you enable a few options for the Raspberry Pi Imager itself, namely to play a sound and/or eject the media when the flashing process is finished, as well as to disable telemetry.
“If you’d like to turn off telemetry, that’s fine; all it does is send a ping to the Raspberry Pi website that lets us create the statistics pages here,” said Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Chief Product Officer Gordon Hollingworth.
But that’s not all, as Raspberry Pi Imager 1.6 also improves support for Linux systems by fixing the “Client tried to set invalid geometry” error on Wayland sessions, adding support for filtering out ZRAM virtual devices in the drive selection, and allowing NVMe drives as the target drive.
The main user interface was change a bit too, and the “Choose SD Card” button is now called “Choose Storage” since Raspberry Pi Imager supports other media types. Other than that, the app now handles .ISO images better and comes with updated language translations.
You can download Raspberry Pi Imager 1.6 right now from the project’s GitHub page for Ubuntu/Debian, macOS, and Windows systems, or you can install it on your existing Raspberry Pi OS using the sudo apt install rpi-imager command in a terminal emulator, that if you use the official Raspbian repositories.
Update 29/03/21: Raspberry Pi Imager 1.6.1 is out now to improve support for Fedora Linux, add a workaround for cases when the tool is run in a sandboxed Linux environment where udisks2 reports the mount operation as being completed but it’s not yet available in the sandbox, as well as small improvements to the new Advanced options panel and updated translations.
Last updated 3 years ago
