The primary purpose of an operating system is to provide a consistent software platform, regardless of the underlying hardware. Once the operating system is installed, it can be expanded with many other software packages.

Raspbian is a good example of a Linux-based operating system. As Raspbian is based on Debian, it has access to its huge software repository. Raspbian initially had access to over 35,000 different software packages in the Debian repositories, but this number keeps growing.

Debian Wheezy, on which Raspbian is based, doesn't officially support the older ARMV6 CPU in the Raspberry Pi. During initial development of Raspbian in 2012, the developers spent a huge amount of time recompiling the vast collection of software in the Debian repositories for the ARMv6K architecture to get maximum performance out of the Raspberry Pi.

This chapter runs through several different methods of installing software on your Raspberry Pi.