Image courtesy of: alatryste
There is now a new recommended image to download from the Raspberry Pi downloads, offering a significantly faster operating system for your Raspberry Pi. The image is an optimized (for the Raspberry Pi) version of Debian wheezy. Among other things the key optimization is using Raspberry Pi’s hardware support for floating point numbers.
I am looking forward to trying this out soon but have a shortage of SD cards, going to pick up a new one shortly and then play with them. I don’t want to loose or delay anything I am doing on the original squeeze image (for one thing I have invested around 24 hours of waiting for things to compile).
Apparently there could be a performance increase of up to 40%, I am looking forward to it 
. I believe that there is another key optimization in the pipeline which is to utilize the graphics chip for display of the X desktop, which should provide another significant improvement.