Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 7th Mar 2013 11:43 UTC
"When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn't come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old, we decided to find out how Raspbian - the officially recommended Pi operating system - came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers."
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Member since:
2012-12-28
Yes, the information about them is only from the article and comentaries. I'm not connected to the raspbian project.
On the other hand, I've been a long time using Debian, both for hobby projects and for work. I've been using it continuously from version 1.3.1 onwards, and in embedded scenarios in the MIPS and several ARM variants.
About the compile farm: Debian is not setup for cross-compiling the operating system (in contrast to Angstrom, for example).
Not so long ago, you could cross-compile Debian using scratchbox (based on qemu emulating ARM, patched so that it calls the native cross-compiler when necessary), but as Nokia abandoned Maemo I suspect that scratchbox is not being updated anymore, so not usable with Debian Wheezy.