You can do an awful lot of very clever things with a Raspberry Pi, many of which we’ve covered here at Lifehacker previously. But if the prospect of setting up SD cards and choosing a distribution is just a bit too daunting, a new tool should make it a much more inviting prospect.
NOOBS — that’s New Out Of Box Software — is a utility designed to make setting up a Pi for the first time substantially easier. No messing around with shifting images or anything of the sort.
You simply download the NOOBS ZIP file, unzip it onto a 4GB or larger SD card and pop it into the Pi. Boot it up, and it will hit you with a menu where you can choose your distribution of choice to install, be it the near-default Raspbian or something more media-centric such as RaspBMC. NOOBS stays resident on the card, which means if you ever fancy switching operating systems, it’s as simple as holding shift down during the boot sequence.
Comments
3 responses to “NOOBS Simplifies Raspberry Pi Setup”
Excellent .. will give this a try 🙂
That’s quite cool. I have no problems installing linux distros, but that kind of convenience is awesome.
Best name ever 😀