3.3 Raspbian Operating System:
Raspbian is a Debian-based free operating system optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. It is the current recommended system, and was officially released in July 2012, although it is still in development. It is free software and maintained independently of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It is based on ARM hard-float Debian 7 'Wheezy' architecture port with the LXDE desktop environment, but optimized for the ARMv6 instruction set of the Raspberry Pi. It provides some available software packages), pre-compiled software bundles. A minimum size of 2 GB SD card is required for Raspbian, but a 4 GB SD card or above is recommended. The downloaded Raspbian "wheezy" image file has to be unzipped and then written to a suitable SD card, formatting it for use.
3.3.1 Installing the Operating System on the RPi
3.3.1.1 Download The Image
Official images for recommended Operating Systems are available to download from the Raspberry Pi website: raspberrypi.org/downloads
Alternative distributions are available from third party vendors.
3.3.1.2 Installing Operating System Images Using Windows
- Insert the SD card into your SD card reader and check which drive letter was assigned. You can easily see the drive letter (for example G :) by looking in the left column of Windows Explorer. You can use the SD Card slot (if you have one) or a cheap SD adaptor in a USB port.
- Download the Win32DiskImager utility from the SourceForge Project page (it is also a zip file); you can run this from a USB drive.
- Extract the executable from the zip file and run theWin32DiskImager utility; you may need to run the utility as administrator. Right-click on the file, and select Run as administrator.
- Select the image file you extracted above.
- Select the drive letter of the SD card in the device box. Be careful to select the correct drive; if you get the wrong one you can destroy your data on the computer's hard disk! If you are using an SD card slot in your computer and can't see the drive in the Win32DiskImager window, try using a cheap SD adaptor in a USB port.
- Click Write and wait for the write to complete.
- Exit the imager and eject the SD card.