Operating systems
The Raspberry Pi primarily uses Unix-like Linux-kernel-based operating systems, such as variants of Debian and Fedora.
Raspberry Pi Models A, A+, B, and B+ are based on the ARM11 family chip, which runs on the ARMv6 instruction set. The ARMv6 instruction set does not support Ubuntu and Windows.
However, the recently launched Raspberry Pi 2 is based on ARM Cortex A7, which is capable of running Windows 10 and Ubuntu (Snappy Core). The following operating systems are officially supported by all the models of Raspberry Pi and are available for download at the download page:
- Raspbian: We will be using this with Raspberry Pi throughout the book
- OpenELEC
- Pidora (Fedora Remix)
- RASPBMC
- RISC OS
Raspbian
Raspbian is an unofficial variant of Debian armhf (ARM Hard Float) compiled for hard float code that will run on Raspberry Pi computers. It is a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware.
Note
To know more about Raspbian, visit http://www.raspbian.org/.