The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a version of its lightweight Pixel operating system for PC and Mac. The Linux-based operating system is typically used for the Raspberry Pi single-board computers. Now you can use it to used to breathe new life into really old computers.
The Pixel operating system that runs on Raspberry Pi computers sports a clean and modern user interface along with a suite of open source productivity software and programming tools. The PC and Mac version of the operating system is an experimental version of Debian+Pixel for x86 platforms and has all those features except for Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica (due to licencing issues).
According to Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton:
Because we’re using the venerable i386 architecture variant it should run even on vintage machines like my ThinkPad X40, provided they have at least 512MB of RAM.
This means it’s time to dig out that old laptop from 10 years ago.
To run the operating system on your computer, just download the image here, burn it onto a DVD or flash it onto a USB stick. Then you can boot it directly onto your PC or Mac.
Bear in mind that this is just a prototype operating system. According to Upton:
Due to the wide variety of PC and Mac hardware out there, there are likely to be minor issues on some hardware configurations. If we decide that this is something we want to commit to in the long run, we will do our best to address these as they come up.
For more details about the new operating system, head over to the Raspberry Pi Foundation page.
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