Raspbian on Raspberry Pi Front Page

[mpthompson]

Hi everyone,

Looking at the front page, it looks like the Foundation is spilling the beans that future official images from the Raspberry Pi foundation will be based on Raspbian. The first image should be out soon and will essentially be a close work-alike clone of the Debian Wheezy armel image that was released by the Foundation a few weeks ago. Of course, the Raspbian based version will have all the hard float and armv6 instruction goodness that we've come to enjoy with Raspbian.

Given that this project only started in earnest in the beginning of March, we've come a long way and I consider it a great honor that the Foundation is choosing to use Raspbian for their official images for the Raspberry Pi. Hopefully we'll be able to continue to improve Raspbian in the coming months and this honor will continue indefinitely in the future.

Most of all, I want to thank Peter Green (aka Plugwash) who brought to this project a wealth of Debian knowledge and experience. Without his help and advice, I almost certainly would have been lost in the weeds. Also, thank you to everyone in this forum and the IRC channel for your support, encouragement and suggestions that have played an important role in improving Raspbian. Finally, a big thank you to the Debian Project. Until Raspbian, I was just a happy user of Debian for nearly 10 years. Although Raspbian is an unofficial port of Debian, I hope that it pays proper homage to the spirit and tradition of Debian as a free operating system. With some good luck, Raspbian will hopefully expose tens of thousands or more of new Linux users to Debian.

Unfortunately, the Foundation's SPAM blocker for some reason doesn't like me today and I can't respond to questions in the blog itself. In any case, I expect a whole lot more people to be making their ways to the Raspbian forum over the next few days and weeks. Welcome everyone...

Mike Thompson

[ejsolutions]

A MASSIVE well done to all who have helped to create Raspbian.

[dom]

A big thank you from me for Raspbian. It's been a heroic effort from Mike and Peter.
I've been running with Raspbian the last couple of weeks and everything has just worked.
It took about ten minutes with the Raspbian version of Alex's Wheezy image for the excited whispers to go round - it's good!
I think you'll have a lot of new fans in the coming days.

[mpthompson]

Thanks dom. Early on was rather surprised that the Debian Project wasn't able to devote resources to creating a Raspberry Pi optimized version of Debian. Especially given the huge press that the Foundation was able to generate around the Raspberry Pi. In any case, I'm glad the opportunity presented itself to help both the Debian community and Raspberry Pi community with a project such as Raspbian. Perhaps having Raspbian might still make rolling things officially back into Debian a possibility.

BTW, I really hope that you are able to work with Plugwash to fix the issues he's encountering creating a proper Debian-style package for the 3.2 kernel. He's working off the deltas from bootc's kernel and layering them over the Debian enhanced 3.2 kernel with pretty good luck. However, there are a few remaining stability issues that we could really use help with as neither of us are experienced with kernel debugging. I believe using a Debian kernel as a baseline will be the best fit for the goals of Raspbian (to be as close to real Debian as possible) and will make it fairly easy for people to build/maintain their own kernels using the Debian build tools.

[oztrailrider]

This is great news!. Congratulations to Mike and Peter for all their hard work which has given us such a great distribution for the Raspberry Pi. I look forward to mucking around with the official image when it comes out.

[asb]

BTW, I really hope that you are able to work with Plugwash to fix the issues he's encountering creating a proper Debian-style package for the 3.2 kernel. He's working off the deltas from bootc's kernel and layering them over the Debian enhanced 3.2 kernel with pretty good luck. However, there are a few remaining stability issues that we could really use help with as neither of us are experienced with kernel debugging. I believe using a Debian kernel as a baseline will be the best fit for the goals of Raspbian (to be as close to real Debian as possible) and will make it fairly easy for people to build/maintain their own kernels using the Debian build tools.

We want to move to 3.2.x, so imagine this will be high on the list after the new image is out of the door.

Thank you to Mike, Peter and all other contributors for all your hard work.

[dukla2000]

Mike - thank you! Peter - thank you!

Mike - congratulations! Watching the 'gestation' of your dream of hf for Pi turn into reality has been a privilege and honour. And a '+1' for Open Source that enables some nutter with a dream to go down to his basement, build a farm, get some help from other folk all over the world and deliver something really worthwhile.

Thanks to to all "the other folk".

[RaTTuS]

grats to all...
I've been using raspbian a lot recently and I think that it's the way to go ....

[bleep42]

Congratulations Mike and Peter,
I've been watching all of your afforts from almost the very begining and I'm very pleased for you that the foundation has at last recognised your fantastic work and massive time and financial contribution. Long may you continue, I hope you get some extra support now.
All the best. Kevin.

[Montala]

I am sure that is mainly down to the ceaseless work and dedication which both Mike and Peter have put into the 'creation' of Raspbian that the Foundation have now decided to adopt as is the 'official' distro for the Raspberry Pi, and they (plus the rest of the 'team') are to be congratulated for their efforts.

Onwards & upwards!

[pithonica]

"We’re hoping to release an official image based on Raspbian, the hard-float optimised port of the Debian operating system for the Raspberry Pi, over the next few days." (Liz)

"Looking at the front page, it looks like the Foundation is spilling the beans that future official images from the Raspberry Pi foundation will be based on Raspbian" (Mike)

Some posts are talking about Raspbian as THE official distro and others as AN official distro. The Fedora remix was the Foundation's preferred distro for months UNTIL it was released and downloaded. Raspbian deserves a better shake than to be the preferred release right out of the gate.

That out of the way, congratulations on the concept and execution. So many distros downstream of Debian. So Raspbian is logical not just as a candidate for preferred educational distro (given the Debian material being drafted), but as a potential upstream for other raspi distros.

[asb]

The Raspbian image we release will be the one recommended for most users.

[pithonica]

"The Raspbian image we release will be the one recommended for most users"

Everything I can see suggests it "will be". If you folks have any say let that official recommendation wait until its been posted as an official downloadable distro for a while.

YMMV

[mpthompson]

pithonica, I'm not quite sure I understand your point about "official".

From my perspective, I'm very happy to see the Foundation move forward to creating a Raspbian image that, for now, they seem to be happy with. If anything, it alleviates the need for Plugwash and I to come up with our own "official" Raspbian image as I believe both of us are most comfortable working on the backend repository so that it is as close to being a "Debian" distribution as possible. I find working on images to not be very rewarding as you can never included what everyone wants to see. Some people want very minimal images, others want everything including the kitchen sink, with others wanting something in between. The good news is, I'm seeing signs there will be community supported Raspbian based images that run the gamut of what people may want to see in images.

In terms to there being "an" official image. I believe that it's only "official" in that it will be an image created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the contents of the image being completely specified by them. I don't believe this precludes the Foundation in the future producing other "official" images based on Fedora, Gentoo or other Linux distributions. In that case, there will be multiple "official" images with each being created to fill specific needs within the Raspberry Pi community. I guess time will tell how this all actually plays out.

Everything I've state above is simply my own opinion. Hopefully it somewhat reflects reality, but I may be totally off as to how the Raspberry Pi Foundation sees things.

[TheRobster]

asb and mpthompson, are bot posting to this.
Can we take this to mean you fine gents are working together on this?

I hope so, because from experimenting with both Debian and Raspbian I find that both have significant areas where one is better than the other.
I doubt anyone would disagree that the speed and performance of Raspbian is without peer.
The Debian Wheezy build is one of the most friendly Linux experiences I have ever had.

The combination of the two will be unstoppable!

I will be keeping my fingers crossed that this is the case.

[asb]

Yes, myself mpthompson, plugwash and other Foundation members are all in frequent contact. The first 'Foundation' Raspbian release will be pretty much the same as the armel wheezy release I put out recently (but with extra speediness thanks to that hardfp Raspbian goodness). We'll see how best to move forwards from there to further improve things.

[TheRobster]

Yes, myself mpthompson, plugwash and other Foundation members are all in frequent contact. The first 'Foundation' Raspbian release will be pretty much the same as the armel wheezy release I put out recently

I doubt I am alone in thinking this is great news.
Let me also be among the first to thank all of you for your fine work.

[pithonica]

"I don't believe this precludes the Foundation in the future producing other "official" images based on Fedora, Gentoo or other Linux distributions"

The Foundations downloads page is effectively that list of official distributions. They control which images goes there and stay there and can take more or less interest in the actual contents.

Recommended for all or specific user types is another thing they've done. First with Fedora then with Debian releases when Fedora was not far enough along. The experience of official Raspbian downloads may eventually swing that recommendation to Raspbian, which would be a good thing and in sync with the Debian focus of the guides they are preparing. Cheers!