The following recipes explain how to create bootable SD cards from downloaded disk images using Win32DiskImager.exe, dd, and diskutil.
The Raspberry Pi does not come with an operating system. Before the Raspberry Pi can boot, it needs an SD card with the operating system installed. Preinstalled SD cards are available for purchase. However, downloading and installing an operating system image is not difficult.
Once you've completed this recipe, you will know how to download a Raspberry Pi operating system. The following recipes will show you how to write it to an SD card.
Perform the following steps to write an image to the SD card:
Download a Raspberry Pi image.
Write the image to an SD card.
The easiest way to get started with the Raspberry Pi is to download the NOOBS (New Out Of Box Software) distribution from the Raspberry Pi Foundation website, which can be viewed by visiting http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads. The files from this distribution can be copied directly to a formatted SD card. No additional disk utilities are required to create a bootable image (refer to the Booting with NOOBS recipe).
Included with NOOBS is the Raspberry Pi Foundation's recommended operating system distribution, Raspbian Linux. On the downloads page, you will also find a link to the Raspbian Linux disk image. There are links to a number of other third-party operating systems too. For more images for the Raspberry Pi, visit the Embedded Linux community's wiki page (http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions).
Unlike NOOBS, once one of these individual operating system images is downloaded, you'll need to write it to an SD card using a special disk utility.
If you are using the Mac OS operating system, use diskutil and dd to write the operating system image to an SD card (refer to the Mac OS Disk Utilities recipe). If you are writing the SD card from a Windows computer, use Win32DiskImager.exe (refer to the Image Writer for Windows recipe). If you are using the Linux operating system to write the image to the SD card, use the dd command-line utility (refer to the Convert and Copy for Linux recipe).
The Raspberry Pi website—downloads (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads): The Raspberry Pi website's download page is where you can find links to the recommended versions of Raspberry Pi to optimize operating system distributions. Currently, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has links to the following operating system distributions:
NOOBS and NOOBS Lite
Raspbian (Jessie and Wheezy)
Ubuntu Mate (a Linux desktop)
Snappy Ubuntu Core (a developer distribution)
Windows 10 IoT Core (a developer distribution)
Open Source Media Center (OSMC)
Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC)
PINET (a classroom distribution)
RISC OS (a non-Linux distribution)
The Raspbian Linux distribution is recommended by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It also is the operating system distribution that is used throughout this book.
The Embedded Linux for the Raspberry Pi distributions (http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions): The Embedded Linux community maintains an excellent wiki page on Raspberry Pi operating system distributions. The wiki page has a comparison table and links to downloadable image files. Many of these distributions are specialized for a specific use, such as penetration testing; use as a home theater, firewall, or an inexpensive desktop PC; or the development of software.
Windows 10IoT—Downloads (https://ms-iot.github.io/content/Downloads.htm): Windows for IoT and the other tools that you will need to develop for Windows IoT devices such as the Raspberry Pi are available at this website.
As of this revision, the Window 10 IoT distribution does not have a user interface. It is labeled as Windows 10 IoT Core Insider Preview. The tools needed to interact with the IoT Core are available from the downloads page of Windows 10 IoT.