14 DAY TRIAL // Minibian "Jessie," a Linux distribution developed for all the available Raspberry Pi devices, has arrived and is now ready for download.
There are a lot of Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi (first and second generation), so you might think that there is not a lot of room for another one, although this pun is intended as you'll immediately see.
Many of the available distributions are just recompiled and resized operating systems from the X86 platform, but Minibian "Jessie" is not one of them.
As the name suggests, this is based on Raspbian, which in turn is using Debian, but it's a special blend because it's stripped and only the bare minimum is kept. There is no desktop environment, which means that a lot of other packages are also missing. They are still available in the repos, just not by default.
Minibian "Jessie" is now ready for download
"Minibian 'Jessie' release is finally here! This new release corrects many important bugs and is now based on the new official Raspbian 'Jessie. Obviously the image is compatible (and tested) with the latest Rpi 2B as with the older B and B+," wrote developer Luca Soltoggio.
This is a very small image, and at just shy of 200MB, it's one of the smallest. Don't let the size fool you. This is a powerful little OS with a lot of potential.
According to the developers, Minibian "Jessie" uses Linux Kernel 4.1.7, with some patches, occupies only 29 MB RAM and 451 MB disk space; it can easily fit on a 1GB SD card; it's optimized for the ext4 file system with swap disabled; it has support for RPi B, RPi B+ and the new RPi 2B; it's 100% fully compatible with the official release; and it ships with root password enabled by default (raspberry, and this needs to be changed right after the installation).
You can download Minibian "Jessie" right now and give it a try.