Saturday 25 January 2014

Raspberry Pi 6 Operating Systems

Like any computer a Raspberry Pi requires an operating system - software that allows you to do computery stuff with the hardware. Phones, laptops and even some washing machines have operating systems.  Windows is an operating system and so is Android, Mac OSX, Linux - there are hundreds of different operating systems out there.

This post describes how to install 6 different operating systems for your Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi can use a number of the operating systems available - all for free. You just need to download one and write it to an SD Card to plug in to the RPi. The SD Card is much like a hard-disk on a computer, just like Windows is installed on a laptop's hard-drive, Raspberry Pi Operating systems must be installed on the SD Card.

Tuesday 7 January 2014

CentOS 6.5 Install Problem

I have recently installed CentOS 6.5 on a couple of computers, once without any problems and once with a fatal hang during install.  With both installs I chose to overwrite any existing partitions and use the whole hard-drive.

The problem during the failed install happened as the new partitions were being created. An error window including 'Unable to read group information from repositories' had a Retry button that did nothing. Google was no help (other than to say it might be a DVD read problem) but with some persistence I found a straight-forward solution.

If you get this error, power off the computer then start the installation process again. This time choose to overwrite an existing installation and CentOS will install without this problem recurring.

Easy!