Question 1.4: Selecting an Operating System Distribution There are a numbe......
Selecting an Operating System Distribution
There are a number of different Raspberry Pi distributions. You are not sure which one to use.
The answer to this question depends on what you intend to do with your Raspberry Pi.
If you plan to build hardware projects with the Raspberry Pi, then use Raspbian or Occidentalis (from Adafruit). Of these, Raspbian is the official and most commonly used distribution for Raspberry Pi, but Occidentalis requires less setup to start hacking hardware.
If you plan to use your Raspberry Pi as a media center, there are a number of distributions specifically for that purpose (see Recipe 4.1).
In this book, we use the Raspbian distribution almost exclusively, although most of the recipes will work with any Debian-based distribution.
Discussion
SD cards—especially a 4 GB SD card, which is recommended for most distributions—are not expensive, so get a few and try out a few distributions. If you do this, it is a good idea to keep your own files on a USB flash drive so that you don’t have to keep copying them onto each SD card.
Note that if you are using one of the upcoming recipes, to write your own SD card, then you need to either have a computer that has an SD card slot (many laptops do) or buy an inexpensive USB SD card reader.
See Also
The official list of Raspberry Pi distributions
See Occidentalis