Raspbian based SD card image released for the Raspberry Pi

The first SD card image based on the Raspian distribution has been released for the Raspberry Pi.

This is what Liz just posted on the Raspberry Pi blog:

We are pleased to announce the release of our first SD card image based on the Raspbian distribution. 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. Notably, it is the first official image to take full advantage of the Raspberry Pi’s floating point hardware for, amongst other things, much faster web browsing.

Users who are still using Debian squeeze will definitely want to switch to this, as it contains numerous tweaks and performance improvements to the firmware, kernel and applications. Those who are using the recent Debian wheezy beta will also see a very worthwhile, but somewhat smaller, improvement.

Among many others, we would particularly like to thank:

• Mike Thompson and Peter Green from the Raspbian project
• Simon Hall for his optimised ARMv6 memcpy() and memset() implementations
• Everyone who has contributed to the Raspbian project so far

Special thanks to Edgar (gimli) Hucek, whose omxplayer accelerated media player is preinstalled in this image, and Sergio Conde for his work on packaging it for distribution.

The image is available now from the Raspberry Pi downloads page.

Check out what happened at the Q&A session with the Raspberry Pi Foundation