14 DAY TRIAL // After Raspberry Pi Foundation's Rasbian, LibreELEC is the second Linux-based operating system to receive support for the recently launched Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer announced today.
In celebration of the project's second anniversary, as well as of the international Pi Day, the team announced today the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance update to the LibreELEC 8.2 "Krypton" operating system series.
Packed with new firmware support for the just-released Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ SBC, the LibreELEC 8.2.4 release is here to allow those who plan to buy the new development board to enjoy its powerful features like the dual-band 802.11ac wireless card, Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0, and the 1.4GHz Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU.
"Improvements to WiFi stability and performance on the 3B+ are noticeable," said the LibreELEC devs. "In private testing over the last two months we have been able to stream typical HD media over a 5GHz network at 105Mb/sec without the buffering and dropouts seen with the previous (2.4GHz only) model."
Wi-Fi speed improvements were also noticeable on 2.4GHz networks, though Ethernet remains the number one option for playing large media files on the Raspberry Pi. Despite the CPU and RAM speed increases, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ SBC had a normal operating temperature during 1080p HEVC decoding, said LibreELEC team.
LibreELEC 9.0 development continues in the background
Apart from support for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer, LibreELEC 8.2.4 bumps the Samba file and print sharing implementation to a more recent version to address a critical bug and fixes the LibreELEC settings add-on to resolve a size calculation issue that occurred when attempting to create a backup on external storage.
Regarding the major Samba bug, the LibreELEC team said that it's unlikely that LibreELEC users will be running into any problems. With that in mind, it is recommended that you update your LibreELEC installations as soon as possible to version 8.2.4. In the meantime, the devs are concentrating all of their efforts on the next major release, LibreELEC 9.0.