[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 14:05:48 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> In article <undkh0$10jff$2 at dont-email.me>,
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>>Speculation? Developing a whole entire Linux distro can actually be done
>>on a shoestring.
> 
> Supported over 10 years?

Well, it has been just about 10 years since the Raspberry Pi was 
introduced. I think the Foundation was initially recommending you run 
Debian on it. However, the initial Pi processor’s unusual combination of 
an older ARM instruction set with hardware floating point was not 
efficiently supported by the standard Debian binaries.

So a couple of guys set themselves the job of recompiling the whole of 
Debian from source, optimized for the Raspberry Pi. As I recall, the bulk 
of the job took them 6 weeks. In their own spare time.

They called the result “Raspbian”. You may have heard of it. Though I 
think the Foundation has now taken it over and called it “Raspberry Pi 
OS”.

So there you have it: shoestring plus “supported over 10 years”, just like 
you asked for.