PiDP-8/I Software

The current stable release of this software successfully runs on the stable release of Raspberry Pi OS as of the time of its release, v10 — a.k.a. Buster — released in early July 2019.

The prior stable release of the software (v2019.04.25) targeted the prior OS release, Raspbian v9, a.k.a. Stretch. We believe the current stable software still runs atop Stretch, but it's been a while since we tested it, since the active developers' PiDP-8/I test boxes have all been upgraded to Buster.

The stable release prior to *that* (v2017.04.04) targeted [Raspbian v8](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-jessie-is-here/), a.k.a. Jessie. Somewhere along the line between this release and the one for Stretch, we broke compatibility with Jessie, so if you need to keep running on Jessie, which is now out of support, we recommend that you run version 2017.04.04 of the PiDP-8/I software, the last version specifically tested atop Jessie.

The software should work atop related OSes like [pipaOS](http://pipaos.mitako.eu/), but the project's active developers don't test this.

The project's primary maintainer occasionally builds and runs the software successfully on x86 Debian derivatives. On such systems, the software detects the absence of the PiDP-8/I front panel hardware and works without it.



# Devuan

There is one major exception to the rule that the software works on Debian derivatives. After Debian (and thus Raspbian) moved to `systemd` many years ago, we transitioned to it as well. Thus, the current software does not run out of the box on [Devuan](https://devuan.org/), a Debian derivative that purposefully removes systemd. You can recover the old SysVInit script from the software repo with: