A lightweight, fast, Raspbian-based distro for the Raspberry PI — five years, dozens of releases
pipaOS was a Raspbian-derived distro with just enough software to boot the PI and let you build on it — headless, GUI, robots, kiosks, whatever you could dream. It shipped weekly, fully automated, from a small set of clean build scripts and one stubborn engineer. The latest stable was pipaOS 6.0 (Raspbian Stretch, Oct 2018); daily automated builds ran at 9:10am UTC. A minimal chroot filesystem with QEMU static emulation was also published daily, for building PI software on the cloud.
Download the stable image or the automated daily build, burn with dd, boot. Login sysop, password posys. Fits 2GB cards; 4GB+ recommended.
login: sysop password: posys $ uname -a Linux pimpam 4.x-armv7 ... armv7l GNU/Linux $ apt-get update && apt-get install qt5-default
pipaOS was my first stamp on the embedded world: a minimal system tuned for speed, automated end to end, shipped continuously for five years. It became the base of every distro on this site and the seed of Kano's OS production lines. Building your own Linux — from scratch, for real users — is deeply worth it.
pipaOS was free open source software. Raspberry PI is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation; Debian is a trademark of the Debian Project.