Getting ready for launch: first root filesystem available for download

17th of February 2012 by liz
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I need to start this post with a huge thank you to Webfusion, who have donated a server to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for downloads; and to Liam Fraser, who is administering it for us (at the same time as filming Raspberry Pi tutorials, doing exams and generally being a busy and fantastic volunteer).

Because we anticipate an awful lot of download traffic, we’re having to limit the number of direct HTTP downloads which are available so our shiny new server doesn’t fall over under the strain. We would strongly encourage you to torrent the images instead. After a certain number of HTTP downloads have been made, all the disc images you’ll download from us will only be available as torrents, so you’ll need to install a client like BitTorrent before you start so you can download the files. It goes without saying, but if you torrent the image, please help us out by seeding.

This disc image is not the one we expect people to be using as standard (that’s from Fedora, and has some other exciting stuff bundled with it, which we hope to be putting up over the next few days). It’s the Cambridge reference filesystem, which is a fully functional Debian Squeeze installation containing LXDE (desktop) and Midori (browser); development tools; and sample code for accessing the multimedia functionality on the device.

Head over to our new downloads page, and get downloading!

Edited to add: we’ve been really overwhelmed by the number of you who have so generously been offering to host download mirrors for us, so people don’t have to use a torrent client. Thank you all very much. If you are hosting a mirror, you can help us out by adding a link to http://elinux.org/RPi_Community – and it would also help us enormously if you could let us know how many downloads you’re seeing, which will help us gauge the sort of numbers we need to be looking at for future batches of the Raspberry Pi itself. You can email me via the contacts page.

 

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