A few months ago I asked some basic questions about the possibility of a port of Debian armhf to the Raspberry Pi on this email list. I received a number of thoughtful answers that helped set me on the path to creating Raspbian -- an unofficial port of Debian Wheezy armhf for the Raspberry Pi. With invaluable assistance from Debian Developer Peter Green, there is now a new armhf port in town. Even better, this port has just become the official recommended Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi as indicated here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1605
This unofficial port of Debian armhf will now be downloaded and used by a significant number of the 200,000 existing users of the Raspberry Pi and will hopefully reach a projected 1 million+ users of the Raspberry Pi by the end of the year. Hopefully this will help expose 100,000's of new Linux users to the Debian Project. Just to recap for those who aren't familiar with Raspbian, it's a complete rebuild of Debian Wheezy armhf for the armv6+vfp CPU on the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, for Raspberry Pi users, the regular Debian Wheezy armhf port only supports armv7+vfp3d16+thumb2 capable ARM CPUs. Therefore, to fully utilize the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi users, a complete rebuild of 18,000+ binary packages was needed. This rebuild took about six week to complete using a bank of Freescale iMX53 QSB build servers very similar to what was used in the original armhf port. Also, the armv6 code produced for Raspbian fully ABI compatible with Debian armhf which actually made the port much easier than it otherwise would be. I hope this news will be interesting to Debian-arm mailing list subscribers. Thank you for your guidance and suggestions a few months ago that helped make this new unofficial port of Debian armhf possible. I've been a very happy Debian user for about 10 years now and I hope this returns something to the community. Mike Thompson -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/caeosq-ocitu8wepbfgv0md-a5w6s3_aftyf4kegvqdvwqds...@mail.gmail.com
