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A new version of the official Raspberry Pi OS distribution for the Raspberry Pi family of tiny computers is now available for download with support for Epson printers, various improvements, and bug fixes.
This is Raspberry Pi OS’ first release in 2021 and comes about one and a half months after the previous update, introducing support for Epson printers, screen reader support in the Chromium web browser, which has been updated to version 86.0.4240.197.
Additionally, this release implements a timeout that would hide messages from the USB device monitor feature after 5 seconds and updates the Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak language translations.
Since it reached end of life and it’s no longer supported upstream, the Adobe Flash Player was removed from Raspberry Pi OS permanently, along with the Scratch 2 IDE, which required Adobe Flash to work.
Several bugs were squashed as well to make the PulseAudio sound system work in stereo, address visual artifacts in Chromium’s Google Maps 3D view and fix video playback lockup issues, and improve setting of passwords in the startup wizard when changing the language.
Also fixed is the battery monitor, which failed to load on x86 platforms, an audio issue that occurred when playing a video in VLC Media Player, a crash that occurred in PulseAudio’s volume controller when it was used on multichannel devices, as well as an issue where the ALSA’s output settings were still used by some apps.
As you probably know, the previous Raspberry Pi OS release switched to use the PulseAudio sound system by default instead of ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), which translates to much better audio support, especially for Bluetooth devices.
Under the hood, the new Raspberry Pi OS release is powered by Linux kernel 5.4.83 LTS. You can download it right now from the official website, where you’ll find several flavors, or using the direct download link below.
Image credits: Raspberry Pi Foundation
Last updated 3 years ago
