I just finished setting up my BrickPi using the raspberrian image provided by Dexter. I had everything ready to go and then when I attempted to write my first program, I found that whenever I tried to get a motor to go backwards by providing it with a negative value, it would not respond.
did you try running the LEGO-Motor_test.py script to see if that works. If it works, copy the example. If it doesn’t something else is wrong and you may need to turn on debugging.