Hey All,

Today the Raspberry Pi foundation announced a new Raspbian release.  I’m currently putting it through its paces, but so far it seems great.

Improvements:

WiFi – I had never tried WiFi until today.  I have never had good luck with Linux and wireless adapters.  I have an older Belkin USB N wifi dongle and I plugged it in and it worked instantly.  Used the GUI WPA_CONFIG tool and it found my dongle, my network, and once I entered my password, I was connected.  Super hassle free.

Audio – Apparently there have been fixes for the audio issues.  I haven’t had good experiences with Audio on the Pi.  I go from Composite to HDMI a lot, and I use a lot of different emulators.  There has always been clicks and hisses.  I am hoping this is fixed now.  I will be testing this out later.

Overclocking – raspi_config now includes an Overclocking menu item and has introduced Turbo mode.  This is coming straight from the Raspberry Pi website:

“We’ve been doing a lot of work to understand the impact of voltage and temperature on lifetime, and are now able to offer a “turbo mode”, which dynamically enables overclock and overvolt under the control of a cpufreq driver, without affecting your warranty. We are happy that the combination of only applying turbo when busy, and limiting turbo when the BCM2835′s internal temperature reaches 85°C, means there will be no measurable reduction in the lifetime of your Raspberry Pi.”

This is awesome news!  I’m downloading all of my binaries to this new image and will be testing out the performance for you all.

Have a great night!