Which software for general programming

[meddyliol]

I will be getting my Raspberry Pi today (I hope). As an old 'un I have limited experience with assembly language and C+. I want to learn Python, maybe with a view to building a website. Which is the best OS for this? I have downloaded the Noobs package and the Wheezy one. Another question is, when the Wheezy package is unzipped it leaves me with an image file. Do I just put this on an SD card or do I have to 'extract' the image file. If I mount the image file it only gives a total size of about 58 MB as opposed to the image file of 2.96 GB. Sorry if this sounds a little garbled (I am an old 'un you know ).

If anyone can decode my blurb I could do with some advice.

Thanks

Brian

[jamesh]

Raspbian is the best bet - it's the Foundations recommended OS and the one we do all dev work on.

The reason you only see 58M is that the image is of two partitions, the first is about 60, and that is the one that gets mounted.

If you are up to the job of manually imaging the SD card, I'd go that route, if not NOOBS is really easy to install.

[meddyliol]

Thanks for your prompt reply. I have some experience with computers (am using a Macbook Pro now). How do I go about imaging the SD card? I have formatted the card with the recommended formatter (SDFormatter). Now what do I do?

Thanks again

Brian

[jamesh]

There should be plenty of guides out there for imaging a card from a Mac. I don't use one so cannot comment. google is your friend.

[meddyliol]

OK, thanks for that

[DeeJay]

How do I go about imaging the SD card? I have formatted the card with the recommended formatter (SDFormatter). Now what do I do?

Using SDFormatter is redundant/superfluous if you plan to 'flash' an Operating system image file onto the SD card. But no harm has been done.

The instructions on the Raspberry Pi Foundation Downloads page say:

The following raw images are intended for advanced users. To use an image file, you will need to unzip it and write it to a suitable (2GB or larger, 4GB or larger for Raspbian) SD card using the UNIX tool dd. Windows users should use Win32DiskImager. Do not try to drag and drop or otherwise copy over the image without using dd or Win32DiskImager – it won’t work. If you’re still not clear on what to do, the community on the Raspberry Pi Wiki has written a guide for beginners on how to set up your SD card.

Following that last link will bring you to a page which includes Flashing the SD card using Mac OSX

If all that sounds too daunting, I'd suggest using NOOBS instead - it was designed to make installing as easy as copying a few files using drag-and-drop on the Mac. You will need at least an 8G SD card to install NOOBS at the time of writing. Again, there are lots of tutorials for NOOBS, but the 'official' Quick Start Guide is a good first read.

[meddyliol]

Thanks for all of your replies, I think I have done it with 'sudo dd bs=1m if=~/Desktop/2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk2' I won't know until I have my machine which hasn't arrived yet.

[Richard-TX]

If it were me I would download the image mentioned below and use it. The later versions have bugs that are being worked on.

[meddyliol]

Thanks for that, I am downloading it now. I need all the help I can get.