I'm slightly embarassed

I've been writing about Raspbian and the Raspberry Pi for years. Embarrassingly enough, I never noticed that versions of Raspbian (and thus Debian) are named after characters from Disney Pixar's Toy Story movie franchise. This was pointed out to me yesterday by howchooer Ash (thanks Ash!)

Raspbian is Debian Linux

Raspbian, the official Raspberry Pi operating system, is based on the Debian Linux distribution. In order to give Raspbian that look and feel we all love, a thin application and presentation layer is placed on top of Debian, alongside a set of preinstalled packages, allowing you to easily do things like add a power button to your Raspberry Pi.

Mentioned here How to Add a Power Button to Your Raspberry Pi Because you should always safely shut down your Pi.

By using Debian as a basis for Raspbian, the developers at the Raspberry Pi Foundation didn't need to build an entirely new flavor of Linux, which would add to the already available 630+ Linux distributions.

Origins of the naming scheme

Therefore, it was actually the Debian developers who came up with this naming scheme starting with Debian Buzz, the first Debian version to receive a codename, in 1996. Naturally, the first Raspberry Pi was released in 2012—a full 16 years later—when Raspbian inherited its first name, Wheezy.

Bruce Perens was the Project Leader for Debian 1.1 and also worked for Pixar at the time.

According to the Debian Wiki, Bruce Perens was the Project Leader for Debian 1.1 and also worked for Pixar at the time. He was the one who started the tradition of naming Debian releases after Toy Story characters.

With the recent release of Toy Story 4 coinciding with the release of the much-heralded Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspbian Buster, I thought it would be fun to briefly cover the various Raspbian versions and the characters who defined them.