You don’t need to own a Raspberry Pi to make use of the Raspberry Pi Imager. This nifty image writer makes flashing ISO, IMG, and similar files to USB drives and SD cards mighty easy.
A new update, Raspberry Pi Imager 1.9, was released this week with some big changes.
For one, this open-source and cross-platform image writing tool now uses Qt 6.
This framework uplift offers a stack of underlying improvements in terms of stability, plus visual changes too. Raspberry Pi say the Qt 6 port provides “a lightly refreshed UI throughout on all platforms.”
Comparing the Qt 6 UI to the Qt 5 one used in previous release, the only changes do appear “light”. The corners of buttons are now rounded, and there is improved hover styling when mousing through the devices/os/storage dialogs.
But the biggest change is in packaging.
Raspberry Pi Imager is now available as an AppImage on Linux. This makes the tool a portable option since you can only need to download the AppImage once to run it on all your Linux machines without the need for native system packages on each.
Raspberry Pi OS is getting a new package that ‘installs’ the AppImage.
Other changes in Raspberry Pi Imager 1.9 include:
- Message appears if no storage devices are available
- OS customisation feature checks usernames for validity
- CLI adds new
--disable-ejectflag - Timeout on systems with lots of loop mounts (e.g., snaps) fixed
- localectl now works on recent Debian/Ubuntu releases
- Native system crypto libraries preferred (e.g., GnuTLS on Linux)
- Packages are now signed with a new Raspberry Pi Ltd key
- BCM2712d0 support
- Updated French, Italian, and Simplified Chinese translations
You can download the Raspberry Pi Imager for Windows, macOS, and Linux from the official Raspberry Pi website (which offers a DEB for Ubuntu). The new AppImages can be downloaded from the Github release page under the ‘assets’ section.
The new Linux AppImage is available for both Intel/AMD and ARM64 systems. As of this release, the Raspberry Pi Imager is no longer available for 32-bit ARM or 32-bit Intel/AMD. On other platforms, v1.9 requires Windows 10 or later, or macOS 11 or later.