info-beamer hosted 13 released

The info-beamer hosted operating system gets a release.

New Features

This release mostly focuses on minor internal improvements in addition to the following changes:

Support for all Pi4 revisions

The Pi4 is out for a while now, but there are still new hardware revision released. Some of those revisions require newer Linux/Firmware releases. These are now included in this update.

Updated RPI Firmware/EEPROM/Kernel

The Pi firmware, EEPROM and Linux kernel have been updated.

Updated WiFi firmware for some Pi revisions

This might improve reception on some WiFi networks.

Support for offline networks

This release will allow devices to fall back to using automatically assigned local IPs within the 169.254/16 range if DHCP isn't available. This will happen if you connect info-beamer devices directly without any internet uplink. They will be able to self-assign unique IPs and will be able to use the Peer-to-Peer mechanism to communicate among each other. This allows synchronized playback in offline environment using one of the offline plans and for example the new next gen image/video player package.

Storage encryption

This release improves the optional storage encryption feature that has been available for a while. When enabled it previously only encrypted the data partition. While this protected assigned content (like images/videos or setup configuration options) it didn't protect device configuration parameters like WiFi credentials.

This has now been improved. If you set up a new device and enable disk encryption some more sensitive configuration information (like WiFi/SSH) will be now encrypted as well. Decryption requires both the Pi hardware as well as the matching SD card.

Updating to the latest release

You don't have to do anything manually. Within the next months, your devices will be gradually upgraded automatically. Please get in contact with support if you have any questions.

If you want to upgrade manually, you can click on the Activate stable channel option in the Manage menu on the device page of the device you want to upgrade. This will install the new version and reboot the device once. Alternatively you can preinstall the update: Go to the device page, click on Manage and Toolbox.. and select "Trigger deferred update to 'stable'". This will install the update but won't reboot. This is especially useful if you're currently running the testing version of the OS.

A device is also updated if you use the web dashboard configuration editor and apply a new configuration to a device. As usual the updating process includes a failsafe and a device that doesn't reconnect back to the info-beamer service after a configuration change/OS upgrade will be rolled back to the previous working configuration automatically after a few minutes.

Fetching the new version, upgrading the OS all happens in the background and only a reboot that should not take longer than 20-30 seconds interrupts playback briefly.

Questions/Feedback?

Head over to the community forums for questions or feedback regarding this release.