Element 14 Raspberry Pi User Manual page 5

Raspbian
This is the recommended
distro by the Raspberry
Pi Foundation. Unless
you have good reason
to use a different one, it's
probably your best bet.
It's based on Debian Wheezy, so you can easily
install anything from the huge Debian repositories.
The default desktop environment is LXDE,
which is very lightweight, but a little basic for
some tastes. Xfce is available for people who
like a few more graphical niceties. It has the
raspi-config program, which is probably
the easiest way of configuring your Pi.
The Raspberry Pi was designed to get
children into programming, and Raspbian
was designed with this in mind. You'll find Idle
(a Python IDE) and Scratch (a programming
environment for young children) on the desktop.
It's available from: www.raspberrypi.org.
Arch Linux
While Raspbian has
been created to try
to shield users from
the internal setup of
the OS, Arch Linux is
designed to help users
understand how the system works.
The initial image, available from
www.raspberrypi.org, includes just the basic
system to get your Pi running and connected
to the network. It doesn't include much of
the software you may want to use, such as a
graphical environment, for example. You should
find the information you need at
Taking it from this initial state to a working
system will require a bit of work, but along
the way you'll learn about how the internals
of a Linux distribution fit together.
Whether or not this is worth all the work,
does of course, depend on you.
Raspberry Pi User Guide.indd 5
RaspBMC
The Raspberry Pi may
have been designed
as an educational tool,
but hobbyists have
been pretty quick to
make it a toy. This distro
is designed to turn your Pi into a media center
that can be used to control your TV. It's based
on XBMC, which allows you to play music and
videos that you have as files, or stream them
from the internet. The image can be downloaded
from: www.raspbmc.com. For details of how to
install it and set it up, see the following pages.
If you have a MythTV back-end set up, you can
use XBMCPi to provide a front-end interface.
Depending on what type of media you
want to play, you may need to purchase
the codec packs that provide access to
patent-protected video and audio algorithms.
Risc OS
The difference with the
Risc OS is that it is small
and fast. Developed
when the fastest desktop
computer was an 8MHz
ARM2 with 512KB of
RAM. The core system including windowing system
and a few apps fits inside 6MB. That means it's fast
and responsive on modern hardware. The memory
taken by apps is usually counted in the kilobytes.
To Risc OS a 700MHz 512MB Raspberry Pi is
luxury, what to do with all that memory? Risc OS like
Raspbian, takes you to a nice GUI at the startup.
One feature of the Risc OS is that it boots to the
bit.ly/9APmgA.
desktop in 1080P by default. The Risc desktop
is a little retro but is functional in its default mode.
The Risc OS take a little getting used it, one caveat
is that the Ethernet port is disabled at launch so
it requires some configuration before using.
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