Setting up the Raspberry Pi just got easier

…thanks to Beginners New Out Of Box Software.

 Earlier this month, the Raspberry Pi Foundation introduced a piece of software called NOOBS – an acronym standing for New Out Of Box Software – which aims to make it much easier to install a suitable operating system on an SD card, suitable for booting the Raspberry Pi.

With NOOBS, there is no need to download any special imaging software, such as Win32DiskImager, to write the default disc image for the operating system of choice (which is obviously going to be RISC OS if for readers of this site!) Instead, users should download the NOOBS zip file from the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s downloads page and unpack it onto a freshly formatted SD Card (4GB or larger according to the announcement).

With that card inserted in the Raspberry Pi’s SD card slot, and power supplied, a menu of the available operating systems is presented on screen, and selecting one (hint: RISC OS) will cause the image for that operating system to be downloaded and installed in the card’s free space – and from then on, the Pi will boot into that system.

Installing an operating system doesn’t remove NOOBS from the card, however, and holding down SHIFT when booting the Pi launches NOOBS again, allowing the user to ‘switch’ to a different operating system or perform a fresh installation of the current one (for example, if the card has become corrupted).

Shift-booting into NOOBS also provides a means to edit the config.txt configuration file, along with access to the web via a lightweight browser called Arora.

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