Changing the OS on your Tips for getting the most out of your Raspberry Pi pocket computer

What is an OS? An OS is the , the program that lets you access other programs and functions of your computer, like Windows or on your PC. Obviously the Raspberry Pi isn’t as powerful as your desktop PC, so the operating systems that run on a Pi are smaller, less fancy, than your regular PC style OS. Because of this various - specialised OSs - platforms that are built for a specific task have been developed to turn your Pi into a dedicated computer for; general use, a media centre, a gaming rig and much more - new OSs in development include offerings from Android and . Your choice of OS depends on how you are going to use your Pi, but you may want to experiment in the early days. All of the Raspberry Pi Kits from maplin come with an SD card with an OS preinstalled.

Images versus compiling from source? You may see the choice of image or compile when browsing different OS, it’s worth understanding the difference. Images are precompiled versions of the OS, ready to put onto an SD card and execute, compiling from source takes all the latest bits of code from repositories and builds a ‘up-to-the-min- ute’ version of the OS - however, building from source on a Raspberry Pi can take a fairly long time (double figures of hours sometimes) so beginners are recommended to use images. Note that writing images to an SD card requires a program like Win32DiskImager - (see links).

What’s available? There are quite a few OS choices to consider for the Pi including three officially available Linux variants for the Pi... Pidora (based on Fedora Linux) (a DIY OS) Raspbian () - this is the recommended OS for beginners and there are other more specialised OS... OpenElec a slimmed down OS, specially made to optimise performance of the XBMC Media Centre - best performance for media centres over other OS RetroPie a modified version of Raspbian, in the form of a universal emulator for playing retro games - ideal for fixed gaming applications RISC OS A 1080p GUI retro environment specifically built for the ARM processor, made by the original ARM processor team

But wait!... there’s NOOBS! The Raspberry Pi team has given us a brilliant tool in NOOBS (New out of Box Software) NOOBS is a way to make setting up a Raspberry Pi for the first time much, much easier. You won’t need network access, and you won’t need to download any special imaging software. Acting as a kind of pre-OS NOOBS allows you to easily install OS and other software using a simple GUI.

We highly recommend that if you’re not fully versed in the Pi that you go down the NOOBS route - when you boot up for the first time, you’ll see a menu prompting you to install one of several operating systems into the free space on the card. The choice means you can boot the Pi with a regular operating system like Raspbian, or with something else.

An 8GB SD Card preloaded with NOOBS is available from maplin - order code N80CE.

Maplin Electronics, UK, S63 5DL - maplin.co.uk maplin.co.uk/raspberrypi Up-to-date files and installation instructions? Rather than give exhaustive step by step guides on every OS, which could change tomorrow, we’ve collected links to the most up-to-date and relevant info on the more popular OS choices for Raspberry Pi. As recommended overleaf though, if you are new to Raspberry Pi we strongly suggest that you try out NOOBS first, it really is a user-friendly way to start playing with different OS choices for your Raspberry Pi.

Useful Links for Raspberry Pi OS*

MAPLIN http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/8gb-noobs-sd-card-for-raspberry-pi-n80ce http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/raspberry-pi-board-and-starter-kit-r45pi http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/raspberry-pi-advanced-kit-n34qg

NOOBS http://www.raspberrypi.org/introducing-the-new-out-of-box-software-noobs/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Pidora http://pidora.ca/ http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Pidora_Installation

Arch Linux https://www.archlinux.org/ http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi

Raspbian http://www.raspbian.org/ http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianInstaller

OpenElec http://openelec.tv/ http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php/Installing_OpenELEC_on_Raspberry_Pi

RetroPie http://blog.petrockblock.com/retropie/ http://blog.petrockblock.com/retropie/retropie-downloads/

RISC OS https://www.riscosopen.org/ https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Welcome%20to%20RISC%20OS%20Pi

Win32DiskImager http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-operating-systems/win32diskimager

*These links are outside of maplin’s control and as always you should use due diligence when downloading files from the internet Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Logo Mark are Registered Trademarks of the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Maplin Electronics, UK, S63 5DL - maplin.co.uk maplin.co.uk/raspberrypi