Chapter 3. Raspberry PI OS Installation

Table of Contents

Raspberry PI OS is a port of Debian. https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/

Debian is know to be a stable distribution but has unfortunately some packages that are many years old.

Important

Be carefully what gets installed. When installing a package then Debian installs also depended packages. But when the package gets removed Debian is unable to know why packages are installed and keeps the depended packages on the system. Those packages remain on the system, take memory space, get updated, call for other depending packages and might cause nasty update errors. The way out is a fresh installation, this should be done anyway every couple of years since Debian is not a rolling release distribution.

Conclusion, try out things on Debian using a fresh SD Card. If not happy, reformat it. If happy, have fun and repeat it on the target system.

cat /etc/os-release shows what is used. Be aware every 2 to 3 a new major release will come and fresh install might be required. The desired fun packages might be again many years old.

Debian #	Name	Release	End of Life
13	Trixie	2025-08-09	2030-06-30
12	Bookworm	2023-06-10	2026-06-10
11	Bullseye	2021-08-14	2024-08-14

There are ways to get new versions of the fun packages, as deviating from the official repositories or visualization. Visualization for an embedded device as a raspberry sounds odd. Using a rolling release Linux distribution as Gentoo might be more adequate in this situation.

cat /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model will tell the model

cat /proc/cpuinfo show the model and using the Revision number the exact model including the memory size.

vcgencmd get_config int shows also the memory size

Finally uptime shows how long the Raspberry is up and running