Chapter 7: Raspbian

Raspbian is a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your Raspberry Pi run. However, Raspbian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 35,000 packages, precompiled software bundled in a nice format for easy installation on your Raspberry Pi.

The initial build of over 35,000 Raspbian packages, optimized for best performance on the Raspberry Pi, was completed in June of 2012. However, Raspbian is still under active development with an emphasis on improving the stability and performance of as many Debian packages as possible.

Note: Raspbian is not affiliated with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Raspbian was created by a small, dedicated team of developers that are fans of the Raspberry Pi hardware, the educational goals of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and, of course, the Debian Project.

Raspbian comes preinstalled with plenty of software for education, programming and general use. It has Python, Scratch, Sonic Pi, Java, Mathematica and more.

The Raspbian with Desktop image contained in the ZIP archive is over 4GB in size, which means that these archives use features which are not supported by older unzip tools on some platforms. If you find that the download appears to be corrupt or the file is not unzipping correctly, please try using 7Zip (Windows) or The Unarchiver (Macintosh). Both are free of charge and have been tested to unzip the image correctly.

Support Raspbian

Raspbian is a community funded and supported free software effort. Although Raspbian is free software, the development costs associated with it are not free.