Although not on my initial list of Linux distros to look at on the Raspberry Pi, I read some posts online where people raved about PiBang. So I thought I would give it a try.
PiBang - November 2013
When you go to download PiBang, the first thing you notice is a post stating that PiBang is no longer in active development. They claim this is not because of a loss of interested, but because PiBang had reached a point where there was little more to do on it. I guess there is only one way to find out.
Booting PiBang for the first time and immediately run into a problem. The setup screen comes up, but your mouse and keyboard do not work. Also, any devices plugged into the USB jacks on the Raspberry Pi are not powered on. After much research on this problem (and experience from other old distros) I found the problem and a solution. The new model B+ requires newer firmware files to boot correctly. Without them the USB jacks will not be powered up, hence the non-working keyboard and mouse. To solve this problem I manually downloaded and copied the latest Raspberry Pi firmware files onto the SD card and rebooted (I will post an entire follow up post with details on this manual firmware update process).
This time my keyboard and mouse worked. PiBang includes a first-time boot config screen almost identical to Raspbian. I changed similar settings such as region and locale as well as select the option to expand the SD card. When the Raspberry Pi rebooted, PiBang crashed and would not recover no matter how many times I rebooted it. At this point I decided to give up on PiBang. Because it is so much older than the model B+ I have, it is not worth my time to try and figure out how to get it to work. In the future if they release an updated version that is compatible with the B+ I would love to give it a try. But for now PiBang is just too old to be of use.
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