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There is a new Raspbian image for the Raspberry Pi. The Wheezy based image adds support for the new 512MB Raspberry Pi but other than that there are no major changes.

An updated Raspbian “wheezy” SD card image is now available from the downloads page. This is a minor point release, adding support for the 512MB Model B and permitting arbitrary partitioning of memory between CPU and GPU by editing the gpu_mem property in config.txt.

Also available for the Raspberry Pi is TinyBASIC, this is a version of BASIC that takes me back to the days of the ZX Spectrum. It’s a lightweight interpreted version of Basic that would be a nice easy way to introduce kids to Basic or take you back to the 8bit computer era.

A large number of engineering professionals are using the Raspberry Pi to explain to their kids what it is they do at work. When we’ve met these families, the enthusiasm positively dripping off everybody has been extraordinary. But we’ve also had a really surprising number of emails from parents who haven’t done any programming since school, but who still have books on BASIC from when they were kids, remember enjoying computing lessons, and want to share some of what they used to do with their kids. It’s actually a great way to get kids started, especially if you have some enthusiasm of your own to share: enthusiasm’s contagious.

The good news for those people, and for anyone else who wants to learn BASIC from scratch or revisit an old friend, is that TinyBASIC is now available for the Raspberry Pi. Andrew Lack has ported this very lightweight editor, interpreter and graphics package to the Pi, and we think it’s great

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