Adafruit Announces its Own Raspberry Pi Linux Distro Geared for Better Hackability

The initial fervor over the Raspberry Pi Linux PC has perhaps faded a bit, but that’s fine because the thing has been available long enough for master tinkerers such as Adafruit Technologies to do terrific things with it.

Adafruit has actually developed its own Linux distro for Raspberry Pi called “Occidentalis v0.1” (a play on “Rubus occidentalis”, the Latin term for “black raspberry”), which is geared for optimum hackability. The Adafruit gang loves the Raspberry Pi but felt that the latest distro from the latter (Raspian Wheezy) lacked enough features; instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, Adafruit took the good work done in Wheezy and built Occidentalis around it.


Occidentalis includes Hexxeh’s firmware; a 4GB SD image; and support for Bonjour, I2C and hardware SPI, sshd on boot, ssh keygen on first boot, Realtek RTL8188CUS WiFi, one wire support on GPIO #4, and more.


Note well that using this distribution is not for newbs, but if you want to see what it’s all about, you can grab it from Adafruit at your earliest convenience.