Installing Linux on a Pi

Since I last did it, the Foundation have changed the way this is done.

I have a need to complement my RISC OS Pis with Linux to investigate a piece of software which is producing PDF files incompatible with the excellent PDF and its ability to spit-out editable DrawFiles from such files.

I formerly used the old Raspian so rarely I’m not even sure where the old card is, so I need to start afresh, but, having spent hours downloading what is called an image file, I can’t see what I can do with it with my RISC OS Pi! Have they effectively cut us adrift?

Raspbian gave place to Raspberry Pi OS. The new Raspberry Pi 5 uses Debian Bookworm. My Raspberry Pi 4 is using Debian Bullseye (64 bit). You need to reach a stage where you can run the Raspberry Pi Imager (currently it is at version v1.7.5). This presents you with two buttons “CHOOSE OS” and “CHOOSE STORAGE”. RISC OS is among the choices for the former.
Your Raspberry Pi is only a RISC OS Pi when it is set to boot up from a storage device with the RISC OS image on it. I suggest you read here https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ to find out about installing Linux.

I suggest you read here

Thank you, Gavin, for taking the time to reply, but reading there tells me that I need the Raspberry Pi Imager, and can avail myself of a choice of:

Download for Windows
Download for macOS
Download for Ubuntu for x86

None of these are in any way helpful to me. This is why I suggested that we were effectively being cut adrift.

My former install was a simple archive with some files I simply copied to my card IIRC. I may have had to click on an install file, I no longer remember.

There has never been a download of Linux suitable from writing by RISC OS, and you can’t install it by copying some files to an SD card, it’s a complete filing system image.

Only 2 of the 3 32 bit Raspberry Pi OS image options are under the 2GB single file size limit on RISC OS, and I think only Lite is under 2GB when unzipped. You could then write that out to an SD card in a USB card reader on a RISC OS Raspberry Pi using a few lines of BBC BASIC.

But I think the best option fr you is to buy an SD card with Linux pre-installed from one of any number of Raspberry Pi vendors.

and you can’t install it by copying some files to an SD card

He’s thinking of NOOBS, which was, um, a bunch of files dumped on an SD card. ;)

They’ve not done that in a while, now that there’s an official Pi Linux, and the machines are getting to the point where they can do some serious work so come with a serious OS.

You’re not being cut adrift. It’s not an unusual expectation that a person interested in using Linux on the Pi would also have access to some other machine that’s capable of writing an SD image.

See here for using the network installer.

The simplest way to be able to run Linux on a RISC OS Pi is to write the Linux SD card image to a USB drive. You can do that on a Windows machine. Once you have done that, put the USB drive into the RISC OS machine and you will be able to read the FAT partition on that drive. Copy all the files to the Boot:Loader partition (it needs to be more than 50MB in size) except CONFIG.TXT then edit CONFIG/TXT as below. Fit a switch to pins 29 and 30 of the header and your machine will dual boot into Linux or RISC OS. The instrtuctions to load Linux are in CMDLINE/TXT which is (almost) ignored by RISC OS save for disable_gamma and disable_mode_changes.