The Raspberry Pi foundation has a rather noble motive – creating a low cost way to teach young students the basics of computer science. The UK based charity ended up launching the Raspberry Pi in February this year.
The Pi was a cheap minicomputer that was barely any bigger than a credit card, and had two models that cost only $25 and $35 respectively.
It was quite a marvelous engineering feat, given that it could run rather heavy operating systems such as the Fedora Linux distro.
According to their website, the Raspberry Pi will be moving beyond just running Linux distros. It will now have the capacity to run the hugely popular Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
Linux, for all its endless possibilities, still isn’t nearly popular enough to be of use as a full time operating system, in all honesty. Android is ironically a mobile operating system powered by a Linux kernel, but its widespread popularity has attracted developers to it in droves.
ICS, as the 4th version of Google’s ubiquitous mobile operating system, gives the Raspberry Pi access to the very best the mobile dev world has to offer.
Hardware accelerated graphics and video are apparently running smoothly, but Audioflinger support remains an issue in the ICS port for the Raspberry Pi.
Unlike the Aakash tablet, Raspberry Pi brings in a healthy dose of power in a minimally priced (and sized) package. While the former has received lukewarm demand at best, the Raspberry Pi project seems to have a lot more promise in the longer term. Development efforts like this ICS port could only go on to cement its popularity in schools worldwide, and make the One Laptop per Child dream come to fruition for real.
[via The Raspberry Pi Foundation]
