Ubuntu MATE for Raspberry Pi 3

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is here and we are delighted to announce the immediate availability of Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B!

Many thanks to Ben Nuttall, Simon West, Liz Upton and Phil Elwell from the Raspberry Pi Foundation for providing Martin Wimpress with a Raspberry Pi 3 and engineering assistance over the weekend.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, the RAM remains 1GB and the USB and wired Ethernet port arrangement and configuration are unchanged.

Here is what is new to the Raspberry Pi 3:

• Improved performance thanks to a Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit Quad Core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU running at 1.2GHz.
• Integrated 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN (BCM43438) accessed via SDIO using the Arasan MMC controller.
  • This requires that the Broadcom MMC controller is used for the SD card using the relatively new and recently revamped bcm2835-sdhost driver.
• Integrated Bluetooth 4.1 (Classic & Low Energy) (BCM43438 again) is presented as a modem via a serial UART (two-wire - no hardware flow control) with the BlueZ software stack running in H4 mode.
• Improved power management with a 2.5 Amp power supply.
• A new chip antenna is where status LEDs were previously located. The status LEDs are still on the board, right next to the microSD card slot.

The Ubuntu MATE image we’ve prepared supports the integrated Wifi on the Raspberry Pi 3 but support for the integrated Raspberry Pi 3 Bluetooth is still in progress and we hope to enable full support via an update very soon.

The image will fit on a 4GB (or larger) microSHDC card, is pre-configured to enable access to Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 hardware devices such as GPIO, SPI, I2C etc and include replacement memcpy and memset functionality for the Raspberry Pi to optimise performance. We have done what we can to optimise the builds for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 but microSDHC I/O throughput can be a bottleneck so we recommend that you use a Class 6 or Class 10 microSDHC card.

The image is built from the regular Ubuntu armhf base, not the new Snappy Ubuntu, which means that the installation procedure for applications is the same as that for the regular desktop versions ie using apt-get. The images will only work in a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

The first time you boot one of the desktop images it will run through a setup wizard where you can create your own user account and configure your regional settings. The first boot is quite slow but, once the first boot configuration is complete, subsequent boots are much quicker.

Changes

These are the changes that we’ve made since the 15.10.1 release:

2016-02-27 - 15.10.3 for Raspbery Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3

• Added support for Raspberry Pi 3 integrated Wifi.
• Updated BlueZ 5.35 with patch to support the Raspberry Pi 3 integrated Bluetooth.
  • Support for the integrated Raspberry Pi 3 Bluetooth is not working but we hope to have an update that addresses this soon.

2016-02-26 - 15.10.2 for Raspbery Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 (internal testing build)

• Added support for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.
  • No Raspberry Pi 3 integrated Wifi or Bluetooth support.
• Updated to Linux 4.1.18.
• Updated all packages to the current version in the Ubuntu 15.10 archive.
• Fixed an issue where the SSH host keys were not correctly regenerated on first boot.