[clue] What do you run on your Pi?

[David L. Anselmi]

What distros are you using on your Pi hardware?

I run Debian, so naturally I use Raspbian on a Pi.

I've figured out how to debootstrap an image so I don't need the Raspbian images as I like to start 
with a bare system and dress it up how I like.

There was a talk recently that I thought was interesting:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/1021_ARM_BOF.ogv

My thoughts:

The distros settled on ARMv7 and then RPi came out and sold millions of units running ARMv6.  That 
shouldn't be embarrassing or inconvenient, it should be a chance to figure out how to handle the 
next time more easily.  (Of course the issues are very abstract to me so apologies if I'm naive.)

I'm encouraged that Raspbian is doing a good job and it doesn't seem too big an issue that they 
aren't Debian.  It's fine if they're a port or pure blend or just Not Debian(TM).  I'm curious what 
other distros are doing with the Pi.

If ARMv6 became supported by Debian it would be an official installer for the Pi.  It isn't obvious 
to me how that works since you have to boot off the media you're installing to.  (A really small 
image doing PXE boot and/or net install doesn't seem sufficient.  But I guess a boot image on SD 
with the install going to a USB drive might be reasonable.)

I don't know that I care about an official installer since SD cards are so easy to move between 
machines and you can create images on any architecture.  Seems to me that most people have the 
skills to build their own image or are willing to run images built by someone else.  But I don't 
know how hard it is to build a complex image and maybe Raspbian isn't packaging a kernel at all.

I'd like to see the Pi become more capable over time and for it and the distros to become more 
aligned.  It would be really cool if the Freedombox reference hardware cost $35 instead of $100.

Dave