Developers have been quick to update Ubuntu MATE

Feb 29, 2016 09:34 GMT  ·  By

Now that Raspberry Pi 3 has officially landed, the first distributions are arriving, and it looks like Ubuntu MATE 15.10 is the first one to provide support.

The new Raspberry Pi 3 is out and the first Linux distribution to support the new platform (except for the official Raspbian) is Ubuntu MATE 15.10, although that's hardly surprising given the huge amount of work that was put into this flavor. Just like it happened on the Linux desktop scene, Ubuntu MATE for Raspberry Pi is now one of the most interesting and most updated OSes.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B took a lot of people by surprise with its new and shiny 64-bit Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU running at 1.2GHz. Since this CPU is made by the Broadcom, who also built the processors for previous models, app compatibility has been preserved. Hence, the Ubuntu MATE developers had to only upgrade the distribution to provide support for the new hard.

802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 integrated by default

One of the most interesting features for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is the integration of 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 directly into the board. The Linux distribution needs to account for this change and provide proper support.

According to the changelog, support for Raspberry Pi 3 integrated WiFi has been added, BlueZ 5.35 has been patched to support the integrated Bluetooth solution (not working for the moment), the Linux kernel is now at version 4.1.18, all packages have been upgraded to the current version in the Ubuntu 15.10 archive, and an issue where the SSH host keys were not correctly regenerated on first boot has been fixed.

Also, a number of Ubuntu Pi Flavors for Raspberry Pi 3 have been released as well and they include Lubuntu, Ubuntu Server (minimal), Ubuntu Server (standard), and Xubuntu.

As usual, you can download the latest version of the Ubuntu MATE for Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 from Softpedia or the official website. Please keep in mind that this is not an ISO and developers provide extended instructions on how to install it.