DUAL-BOOT+ Booting multiple operating systems

Christian Cawley examines the various ways you can boot your Raspberry Pi, from installing an OS to multibooting.

- Christian Cawley

OUR EXPERT

Christian Cawley is a former desktop support engineer, and has been breeding Raspberry Pis for two years. His efforts have recently been rewarded with the birth of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

Booting an operating system on the Raspberry Pi is straightforward, but the tools used for the process have changed over the years. Since the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Pi’s slightly different architecture, new utilities have been developed, both for single installations and for multibooting. Meanwhile, the price of SD cards has plummeted.

While the basic tools – Raspberry Pi Imager, Etcher and so on – are suitable for single booting, BerryBoot is particularly useful for multibooting, as is NOOBS. There is also a web-based solution that automates single and multiboot installations via your browser, called PINN. Everything explained here assumes you’re using a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard, mouse and monitor attached, with an accessible network connection.

The Raspberry Pi has a decent selection of operating systems available, from the default Raspberry Pi OS and various lightweight alternatives to things such as RetroPie and Recalbox for retro gaming, OSMC and LibreElec for running a Kodi-based media centre, and many more besides.

Installing a single operating system requires you to first download the image file for the OS. This is typically in .IMG format, usually around 5GB in size. Many can be found on the Raspberry Pi website (www.raspberrypi. com) when you click the Software. Others can be found by searching further afield. Here we’ll look at the various options you have for installing a new operating system on a Raspberry Pi.