Welcome to issue 12 of The MagPi - the premier Raspberry Pi magazine for beginners, experts, Pi-fanatics and the merely Pi-curious.

Issue 12 of The MagPi celebrates their first anniversary!

What a year it has been! To mark this incredible achievement, Liz Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation has kindly agreed to be a guest writer for the magazine and has produced an article documenting The MagPi's first year of publication.

The MagPi also take this opportunity to include articles covering some of the less published start up questions in the ‘Beginner’s Guide’ article and reviews some of the operating systems which were produced over the last year for the Raspberry Pi. The MagPi’s very own Ian McAlpine provides a fantastic insight into the mind of Pete Lomas plus more from their great authors on coding.

About The MagPi - from The MagPi themselves!

What we make
We produce a magazine with the intent to help and offer advice to users of the Raspberry Pi. This started out as a simple idea on the well known forums, with a few of us getting together and deciding on a loose outline of what we wanted to achieve.

Over time many have joined and left the team, each bringing their own contribution and ideas to the final piece.

If you had asked us six months ago whether we thought the magazine would be half a year down the line, we would not have been sure. We are now able to offer printed copies, competitions, our own branded Raspberry Pi case, and stable mirrors on a website not entirely made in flash.

Where does the money go?
There are certain administrative costs that go toward producing a reliable magazine, and printing magazines is certainly not free. We get a small amount of money from every copy sold – and this, along with donations and advertising revenue, goes towards funding the entire production team. We also hope to be able to offer more competitions, and better product testing.

You can help
Any donation is very gratefully received. However, you don’t have to put money into this to help us along – time is also one of our limiting factors. If you think you can be of any use in the general production, drop us an email.

The future
We had no idea how successful the magazine would be. Give us another six months, and there should be some real progress made. We are forever receiving requests for more formats, and this is definitely something we are looking into. Translations to other languages would be another great step.