Raspberry PI – great for learning but still no stable operating system

The Raspberry Pi has been shipping for some time now but operating system support is lagging way behind, which is frustrating for those wanting to do more with their Pi’s than learn Python.

The ‘recommended’ OS distribution for the Pi is a version of Debian Squeeze released in April. It appears to have no proper support for the graphics processor, sound doesn’t work and the release has lots of junk links to non-operational applications. Another OS, Fedora Remix, is even buggier although it looks promising. An update was promised for May. Other OS versions include Raspian and a media centre OS, Raspbmc. The latter two OS’s do seem close to releasing stable versions but that has been the case for several weeks. At least one developer has suffered DDoS attacks on their server, which doesn’t help.