Raspberry Pi Announces Arrival of Raspbian OS

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.

_{Follow @JaneMcEntegart on Twitter.}