Raspberry Pi hits the afterburners with Raspbian OS

The bare-bones Raspberry Pi main-board has been in short supply since launch day due to overwhelming demand for the uber-mini $35 Android computer.

Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi foundation recently confirmed that its manufacturing partners have ramped up production, with 4,000 units rolling off the assembly lines on a daily basis.

Order restrictions have been lifted, and customers are no longer limited to one unit per purchase.

If you somehow missed all the coverage of the Raspberry Pi, the cheap little $35 computer is targeted at developers, modders and hackers looking for hardware to play with.

The board features a 700 MHz ARM11 processor, an SD card slot, HDMI output, USB, and Ethernet ports.

A cheaper model that gives up some of those connectivity ports is expected soon for an even more miserly price of $25.

The little computer is capable of running Android, multiple Linux flavors and a recently introduced OS dubbed “Raspbian.”

Raspbian’s creators wanted to create the fastest running OS for the diminutive, low-power computer. As such, the operating system is specifically optimized for the Pi’s hardware specs. The operating system is actually based on Linux (Debian) and includes support for “hard float” code – allowing users to take full advantage of the Raspberry’s hardware.

By offering support for “hard float” code, software that uses floating-point operations should be able to run much more quickly on Raspbian compared to other operating systems. Although a final build of Raspbian isn’t yet available, there are a number of pre-release builds available for download.

Hardcore modders can also overclock the Raspberry Pi for even more performance. Check out the video above to see an overclocked Raspberry Pi.