Image: Raspberry Pi Foundation

New distribution images have showed up on the Raspberry Pi Downloads page, for NOOBS 1.6.0 and Raspbian 2016-02-03. There has not been an official announcement yet (also known as a Raspberry Pi Blog post), but I assume one will come along very soon.

Raspberry Pi: 11 reasons why it's the perfect small server Raspberry Pi: 11 reasons why it's the perfect small server The Raspberry Pi has found its way in to the hobbyist market for computing, but it is also very capable for other business and personal use as well. An extremely low power draw, small form factor, no noise, solid state storage, and other features make it an attractive solution for a small and lightweight server. Read More

The last time there was a delay between the release showing up in downloads and the actual announcement, it was because they were waiting for the Pi Zero announcement before spilling the beans about the software. So maybe it is the same situation this time... or maybe not.

The Release Notes are available, and don't indicate that there are very large changes in this release, just some nice incremental updates, bug fixes, and general cleanup. There may be some interesting internal changes; we'll have to wait for the official announcement to hear about that.

These images are compatible with all Raspberry Pi models (0, 1, and 2). I have installed the new Raspbian release from scratch on my Pi2 with no problem, and I have upgraded an existing installation (apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade), again with no problem. I have not tried the NOOBS release yet.

It appears that one of the biggest changes, at least to NOOBS, is that Windows 10 IoT has been added. That might be good news for some; it is a no-op for me.

I happened to notice these releases because I was working on the Manjaro-ARM release. Now there's something to get excited about... I should be posting a first report in the next day or so.

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