Photo: J.A. Watson

New releases of Raspbian GNU/Linux and the NOOBS installer package appeared on the Raspberry Pi Downloads page last week. These have come very soon after the initial Pi 3 support releases, so they appear to be primarily aimed at bug fixes and enhancements for the new hardware.

The Raspbian release notes mention that there are firmware and kernel updates. I couldn't find any release notes or other information about the NOOBS release; hopefully that will come along soon.

I have loaded and briefly tested both Raspbian and NOOBS on all of my various Raspberry Pi systems. The best news of this release is that the NOOBS installer now recognizes the Raspberry Pi 3 built-in wireless network adapter, so it is now possible to install from NOOBS on a Raspberry Pi 3 without having to use a wired network connection or a second wireless adapter.

More good news on the NOOBS distribution: openELEC now appears in the list when a network connection is established.

I also tested the Bluetooth support in Raspbian, and found that it is still not possible to connect a Bluetooth pointing device (mouse) using the Blueman utility. Of course it is still possible using the CLI bluetootctl utility, and once the device is paired the Blueman icon in the top panel, it shows the correct status and detailed information for it.

I am still hopeful that these last few problems will be taken care of soon. It doesn't even need another release, really, just some nice updates along the way. I will continue to check on the progress periodically.

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