Overview

Raspbian is the official Raspberry Pi operating system that is developed by Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Our goal in this post is to help you pick a Raspbian version and install it to a Micro SD card to get ready for your Raspberry Pi. This entire operation takes about 10 to 30 minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection, the speed of the Micro SD Card and the adapter you use.

Versions

As of today (09/02/2019), Raspbian has 3 different versions.

• Raspbian Buster with desktop and recommended software

This is the largest Raspbian image and comes with most of the software and tools you might need with desktop. This means that you can install this version to your Raspberry Pi and once you connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse you can use it like most of the GUI Linux operating systems.

• Raspbian Buster with desktop

This is a mid sized image with desktop features based on Debian Buster.

• Raspbian Buster Lite

This has the minimal image size that is based on Debian Buster. This version does not support desktop.

List of needs

• Download Raspbian (Direct link to the latest Raspbian )
• Micro SD Card (How to pick a Micro SD Card for Raspberry Pi )
• Etcher   to get Raspbian files written into your Micro SD Card (There are some other tools like Rufus as well, We'll be using Etcher for this post.)

Installation

We will be using the Rasbian Buster Lite version for the installation, but you are free to use one of the 3 versions that we mentioned. The process will be the exact same for each one.

Once you picked and downloaded your Raspbian version, go ahead and run Etcher. Etcher will come with a screen with 3 basic buttons: "Select image", "Select drive" and "Flash!"

Hit "Select image" and select the Raspbian version you've downloaded.

Once you pick the file, you will be able to click "Select drive" to pick a Micro SD Card. Be careful, you don't want to accidentally install it into one of your hard drives or plugged USB drives.

Once you've selected your drive, "Flash!" option will be enabled. Go ahead and click. Flashing and Verifying will take around 5 to 10 minutes in most of these cases.

If you encountered any issues with these steps, you are most likely to have a corrupted Raspbian image. Re-downloading might solve your problem! If you are successful, the entire process will look like the video below.

Your Raspbian is ready to go! As a final step, go ahead and check our Raspberry Pi HATs . Using our HATs, you can create a variety of projects within days using your Raspberry Pi.

• You can build your own smart home
• You can create your own smart IoT hub where you measure air quality, temperature and humidity level.
• Set-up long distance (5 to 15 kilometers), no subscription requiring communication network using our LoRa HAT.
• Even make your own security hub that can detect motion and let you know! 

Scenarios are endless, the sky is the limit!