Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Installing Software on
Raspbian
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.
Package management in Linux
There are many different tools available to manage software on a Linux distribution.
Some of these include the APT and RPM package managers.
Raspbian uses the Advanced Packaging Tool, also known as the APT. The APT
handles the dependencies of any package. Installation and removal of software
packages are handled by an application called dpkg. It is the recommended way
to install any software on your Raspberry Pi. Every part of Raspbian is bundled
into a package.
