Installing Raspbian

Raspbian is the officially supported operating system for Raspberry Pi by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Raspbian can be installed on Raspberry Pi through NOOBS, or as a standalone image:

  1. Browse the page https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ on the Raspberry Pi website. You can find two options at the top of the page:
    • New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS): An easy operating system installer for beginners
    • Raspbian: The officially supported Raspberry Pi operating system based on Debian
  2. Click Raspbian:

Raspbian

  1. You will navigate to the https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ page. Click on RASPBIAN STRETCH LITE, which is a minimal image based on Debian Stretch:

RASPBIAN STRETCH LITE

  1. You can directly download the image file as a Zip file, or you can download it through the torrent. I found that downloading through the torrent is the fastest and most convenient way, but you will need a torrent client installed on your computer. uTorrent and BitTorrent are a couple of the popular clients. You can find plenty of resources on the internet on how to install and use torrent software.
  2. Extract the downloaded compressed image file using 7-Zip (Windows), or the Unarchiver (macOS). You will get an image file like 2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch-lite.img. The first part of the filename indicates the date on which you downloaded the file.