Linux in The News 4-11-22

Last Updated on April 11, 2022 by KC7NYR

Raspberry Pi Powered by Linux 5.15

The new version of Raspberry Pi OS comes a little over two months after the previous one and it’s the first to finally bump the kernel version from Linux 5.10 LTS to Linux 5.15 LTS in an attempt to provide users with some new features that weren’t present in the previous kernel series.

Linux kernel 5.15.30 is included by default in the new Raspberry Pi OS release, though you should know that Linux 5.15 will only be supported until October 2023 while Linux kernel 5.10 LTS will be supported until December 2026.

In addition to the new kernel version, the new Raspberry Pi OS release removes the default “pi” user due to the fact that users are now forced to create a new user account during the first-boot wizard and adds a new rename-user script to allow users to rename existing users by temporarily rebooting.

The first-boot wizard (piwiz) is now capable of running in a separate session as a different user with different graphics and features automatic pairing for discoverable Bluetooth mouse and keyboard devices.

Furthermore, the Overscan feature no longer requires a restart and it’s now managed by xrandr under KMS, and users can now set it independently for both monitors, GTK3 switch controls are now used instead of paired radio buttons, and the Pi Greeter utility was ported to GTK3.

Another interesting change in this new Raspberry Pi OS release is initial support for an experimental Wayland backend, which users can enable from the raspi-config command-line utility in the advanced options.

Talking about raspi-config, the Raspberry Pi OS configuration utility no longer offers the Pixel Doubling option when using the KMS driver and no longer offers the Composition Manager option when a legacy driver is in use.

Among other noteworthy changes, Raspberry Pi OS now features a more intuitive window and application cycling behavior, better FFmpeg hardware acceleration, support for interlaced displays in arandr, as well as the ability for the LXInput utility to remember keyboard delay and repeat settings across reboots.

This release also fixes various graphical glitches, crashes, Raspberry Pi keyboard auto-detect issues, and other bugs that were present in the previous release. On top of that, the Chromium web browser was updated to version 98.0.4758.106 and OpenJDK 17 now defaults to ‘client’ JVM for ARMv6 compatibility.

Download Raspberry PI OS Linux 5.15