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Raspberry Pi rolls out speed surge Raspbian OS

Floating point fruit-filled Linux distro

The Raspberry Pi team has posted its new, recommended Linux distro for its tiny, ARM-based computer.

Dubbed Raspbian Wheezy, it's a custom Debian build that, for the first time, taps into the Pi processor's floating point unit for much faster performance.

"Users who are still using Debian Squeeze will definitely want to switch to this," said Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton, "as it contains numerous tweaks and performance improvements to the firmware, kernel and applications.

Debian Wheezy beta users will also see "a very worthwhile" improvement, he added, though they shouldn't expect the boost Squeeze users will get.

Benchmark testing shows improvements of between four and 40 per cent across a range of applications when moving from Debian's armel architecture to Raspbian's armhf code.

The team said it strongly encourages all Pi owners to download the new OS, which you can do here. ®

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