Raspberry Pi Announces Arrival of Raspbian OS
Time to give your Raspberry Pi a little boost.
Today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the arrival of the Raspbian OS. The operating system, based on Debian and optimized for Raspberry Pi, makes better use of the tiny computer's hardware and provides performance boosts in several areas.
Up until now, Debian had been the most popular OS for Raspberry Pi. Now, Raspbian is replacing Debian as the Raspberry Pi Foundation's recommended install.
"We are pleased to announce the release of our first SD card image based on the Raspbian distribution," RPF said via its official blog. "This is the result of an enormous amount of hard work by Alex and Dom over the past couple of months, and replaces the existing Debian squeeze image as our recommended install."
If you're still using Debian squeeze, you will benefit from many tweaks and performance improvements to the firmware, kernel, and applications. If you're already on Debian wheezy (beta), the performance boost won't be as big but will still be 'very worthwhile.' It's the first official image to take full advantage of Raspberry Pi’s floating point hardware for, amongst other things, much faster web browsing.
"Raspbian is so much faster than the images we’ve been using so far, and we’re really excited about it; we’ll be encouraging all of you Raspberry Pi owners to upgrade to it as soon as it’s available on our downloads page," the foundation said last week, while teasing performance boosts in web browsing.
Check out the video below for a look at browsing on Raspbian.

Yes, in monochrome @ 640x480 res.
I have an old 30GB one sitting around and wondering if that will do.
SSD ?? Really ??
You use de SD as the booting device, you can change to usb, but as far as I know it doesn't have Sata port to put a SSD disk
Correct at this time it can only boot from the SD Card. USB, or network attached storage can be accessed once the OS is loaded.
Yes, in monochrome @ 640x480 res.
Only got it yesterday, will be looking forward to getting into over the weekend. Still waiting for a case to be shipped from Spain.
From the website FAQ:
'How does it boot?
You have to boot from SD but a USB HD can “take over” after the initial boot. You cannot boot without an SD card.'
USB drive is a bit on the slow side unless it is USB 3.0 of course.
Read the
Read the FAQs http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs link failed.
USB 2.0 and only 2 ports.
But as said before SD is a MUST to run Rasperry Pi, try class 10 SD cards if you feel that the boot is slow. That shouldn't be more much slower than USB 2.0