Raspbian Linux Distribution Updated, But with One Unexpected Omission

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New distribution images for the Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian operating system appeared on their Download page a week or so ago. The dates of the new images are 2018-10-09 for the Raspbian-only version, and 2018-10-11 for the NOOBS (Raspbian and More) version.

In a nutshell, this release includes:

  • a number of changes to the “first-run/startup wizard”, which is not surprising since that was just introduced in the previous release
  • a couple of interesting changes which look to me like they are responses to potential security problems (password changes now work properly if the new password contains shell characters? Hmmm. I wonder if this came up simply because some users were having trouble changing passwords, or because some clever users found they could use this to attack the system? Oh, and who ever thought it was a good idea to display the WiFi password by default?)
  • updates to the Linux kernel (4.14.71) and Pi firmware
  • various other minor updates, bug fixes, new versions and such
  • removed Mathematica
  • Raspberry Pi PoE HAT support

Those last two are the ones that really produced some excitement in the Raspberry Pi community. Just look at that next to last one… so innocent looking… but then go and look at the discussion in the Pi Forums about it.

Read more at ZDNet