How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi

By Karl L.
in Linux

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Karl L.

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When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn't come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from?

With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old, we decided to find out how Raspbian?the officially recommended Pi operating system?came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/how-two-volunteers-built-the-raspberry-pis-operating-system

This is a really interesting article about the developers who built the recommended OS image for the Raspberry Pi. I highly recommend that you take the time to read the whole thing. It interested me especially because of my involvement with Debian, and the fact that I love my Raspberry Pi. I have never bootstrapped a port to a new architecture nor setup an automated build environment before, but I do have experience building Debian packages from source, packaging Debian software, and using many of the development tools described in the article. As such I found their insight into the creation of an optimized port very interesting in light of recent efforts within Debian to break dependency cycles and make cross-building easier.

Further reading into Debian bootstrapping (warning: heavy technical content):

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/01/msg00329.html

[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianBootstrap

[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/02/msg00413.html

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