This page contains links to SD card images for various Linux distributions. For each distribution, we provide both a direct HTTP download, a torrent file and a SHA-1 hash; the total number of concurrent direct downloads is limited, so we encourage you to use the torrent file if at all possible. It’s helpful to us if you download the torrent from this page, because it means we can see how many downloads are going on and use that to make rough predictions about sales.

If you’re a total beginner and the above paragraph makes no sense at all to you, please come to the beginners’ section of our forum, where you can ask questions and members of our very friendly community will do their best to help you out.

If you are unable to torrent the file and we’ve run out of HTTP download room here, you can see a list of mirrors for direct HTTP downloads that our amazing community has set up on the wiki.

To use an image file, you will need to unzip it and write it to a suitable 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.

Thanks to Webfusion Managed Hosting for providing hosting and bandwidth for this service.

Debian “squeeze”

If you’re just starting out, this is the image we recommend you use. It’s a reference root filesystem from Gray and Dom, containing LXDE, Midori, development tools and example source code for multimedia functions.

Arch Linux ARM

Arch Linux ARM is based on Arch Linux, which aims for simplicity and full control to the end user. Note that this distribution may not be suitable for beginners.

QtonPi

QtonPi is an Embedded Linux platform plus SDK optimized for developing and running Qt 5 Apps on Raspberry Pi. More information is available here.