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Introducing the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro – Our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry PI. Adafruit loves the new Raspberry Pi 
– especially how easy it is to hack circuits using the electronics breakout pins! But sadly, the latest official distro “July 15 Raspbian Wheezy” did not have many of the delicious hackables built in. That’s why we decided to roll our own distribution.
Our distro is based on “Wheezy” but comes with hardware SPI, I2C, one wire, and WiFi support for our wifi adapters. It also has some things to make overall hacking easier such sshd on startup (with key generation on first boot) and Bonjour (so you can simply ssh raspberrypi.local from any computer on the local network).
This is our first distro, Occidentalis v0.1. Rubus occidentalis is the black raspberry. It is derived from Raspbian Wheezy July 15.
We have made a few key changes to make it more hardware-hacker friendly!
- Updated to Hexxeh firmware
- 4 Gig SD image (will not fit in 2 G cards!)
- I2C and hardware SPI support
- I2C/SPI modules initialized on boot
- sshd on boot
- ssh keygen on first boot
- runs ahavi daemon (Bonjour client) and is called raspberrypi.local
- Realtek RTL8188CUS wifi support
- One wire support on GPIO #4 when loaded
Please keep in mind, we are not full time linux distro maintainers – we will try to fix any bugs we find but this distro is not for beginners or people who are new to linux!
FEED
just a suggestion: Use an 8gig card. My pi came with a 4gig and it’s BAM out of space before I know it!
Comment by moser — August 3, 2012 @ 9:26 am
Cool work, well done. As the RPi Foundation appears keen on merging things (reiterated with the post/talk on the Android 4 kernel) perhaps this will provide impetus to include the Adafruit goodness into the standard Wheezy build. RPi should not be afraid of larger card sizes to keep costs down as 8 and 4 GB cards cost what 4 and 2 GB cards cost just a few months ago.
Back to Pi Hacking!
Comment by Mike — August 3, 2012 @ 10:09 am
Well done.
I’ve been using several 8 gig Sandisk Extreme 30MBs SD cards with Wheezy with no problems.
Comment by Andy Panayotoff — August 3, 2012 @ 10:34 am
Damn, I was trying to resist the urge to buy one, as I really don’t need one yet, but damn!
Everybody is conspiring together to make everything so easy and fun, and now this…
Ok, I’ll just buy one…
Comment by Cristián Arenas Ulloa — August 3, 2012 @ 11:30 am