Raspberry Pi owners will soon be enjoying a much faster operating system thanks to the efforts of the developers behind Raspbian. Raspbian Linux is a distro based on Debian, but with all the packages optimized specifically for the Raspberry Pi. While multiple flavors of ARM-friendly Linux are already available for the tiny machine, Raspbian is the first to target it specifically and focus on performance. The new OS also takes full advantage of the floating point hardware the boards processor contains something previous distributions haven’t been able to do.
One of the Raspberry Pi developers has been experimenting with Raspbian and the performance improvements it brings. He has also managed to successfully overclock the board to run at 1GHz instead of the stock 700Mhz the ARM11 chip ships at. And the results are very encouraging.