Raspberry Pi

Bootable OS for Raspberry Pi 2

About official Operating System

Several types of OS, which can boot Raspberry Pi 2, are listed its official web site.
https://www.respberrypi.org/downloads/
The OS and installer that Raspberry Pi Foundation officially supports are:

About Raspbian

Raspbian is derived from debian and optimized for Raspberry Pi.
Due to the difference in the license policy, Raspbian is NOT officially a part of debian.

As of today (October 2015), two different versions of Raspbian are distributed.

  • Raspbian Wheezy (equivalent to Debian Wheezy (7.x)). It was released on May 5, 2015.
  • Raspbian Jessie (equivalent to Debian Jessie (8.x)). It was released on September 24, 2015.

Installing

The operating system is distributed in dd image for microSD. The installation process is completed when this OS image is written into microSD, using dd tools.
To work on a Linux, please read the instruction that is listed at the URL below.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/linux.md

The required microSD card is at least 8GB and class 4. For more details, please read Quick Start Guide.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/quick-start-guide/

  • To install Wheezy
  1. Download the image file on Linux.
    $ wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2015-05-07/2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy.zip
  2. Unzip the downloaded image file.
    $ unzip 2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy.zip
  3. A microSD card, which the image will be written, is attached to Linux that you are working on via a card reader. Please check the device name, applying the command of df -h.
    For this example, the microSD card is recognized as /dev/sdf.
    If you work on Ubuntu, and the microSD card is automatically mounted, please unmount the SD card.
    $ umount /media/beat/163-56 
  4. Applying dd command, the image file is written into the SD card.
    $ sudo dd bs=4M if=2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy.img of=/dev/sdf
    781+1 records in
    781+1 records out
    3276800000 bytes (3.3 GB) copied, 407.765 s, 8.0 MB/s
  5. When the writing process is completed, please remove the microSD card from the SD card reader, for a while. Then, re-insert the microSD card into the SD card reader. Please check whether the image file is correctly written into the microSD card or not. If the image is successfully written into the microSD card, the partitions such as shown below, are created inside the microSD card.
    $ df -h
    Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/sda1        97G   74G   18G  81% /
     Skipping
    /dev/sdf1        56M   20M   37M  36% /media/beat/boot
    /dev/sdf2       2.9G  2.6G  176M  94% /media/beat/13d368bf-6dbf-4751-8ba1-88bed06bef77

  • To install Jessie
  1. Download the image file on Linux
    $ wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2015-09-28/2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip
  2. Unzip the downloaded image file on Linux.
    $ unzip 2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.zip
  3. A microSD card, which the image will be written, is attached to Linux that you are working on via a card reader. Please check the device name, applying the command of df -h.
    For this example, the microSD card is recognized as /dev/sdf.
    If you work on Ubuntu, and the microSD card is automatically mounted, please unmount the microSD card.
    $ umount /media/beat/163-56
  4. Applying dd command, the image file is written into the microSD card.
    $ sudo dd bs=4M if=2015-09-24-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/sdf
    1031+1 records in
    1031+1 records out
    4325376000 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 528.764 s, 8.2 MB/s
  5. When the writing process is completed, please remove the microSD card from the SD card reader, for a while. Then, re-insert the microSD card into the SD card reader. Please check whether the image file is correctly written into the microSD card or not. If the image is successfully written into the microSD card, the partitions such as shown below, are created inside the microSD card.
    $ df -h
    Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/sda1        97G   74G   18G  81% /
    Skipping
    /dev/sdf1        56M   20M   37M  36% /media/beat/boot
    /dev/sdf2       3.9G  3.1G  595M  84% /media/beat/ec2aa3d2-eee7-454e-8260-d145df5ddcba

To boot Raspberry Pi from the microSD card, just insert the microSD card that the OS image is written to the SD card slot of Raspberry Pi 2, and please turn on its power.

Revision History

  • 2015-10-20 This document is initially released.

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Last-modified: 2015-10-20 (Tue) 03:56:44 (3338d)