Raspbian

Quoted from the Raspbian main site

Raspbian is a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware.

An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your Raspberry Pi run.

However, Raspbian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 35,000 packages, pre-compiled software bundled in a nice format for easy installation on your Raspberry Pi.

Basic Setup

Download the latest image (based on Debian Wheezy, with a Linux Kernel 3.12) and create a SD card with the following commands:

Warning: modify the file name and the device if needed.

unzip 2014-06-20-wheezy-raspbian.img.zip

dd bs=4M if=2014-06-20-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdb

Plug the SD card and boot the system (default login: pi / raspberry).

See the official site for more informations.

Wayland and Weston

Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.

Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. See the Wayland website.

The Weston Wayland compositor has been improved and packaged for the RPi by Collabora, that is known to work on a new, more responsive and more modern desktop experience for the Raspberry Pi.

Just a few simple steps are required:

  1. Add "deb http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy rpi" to /etc/apt/sources.list

  2. sudo apt-get update

  3. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  4. sudo apt-get install weston

You can also then install the (beta) browser Epiphany to test some videos in HTML5:

  1. sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser

  2. Start the browser from the applications menu, “Internet”, “Epiphany Web Browser”

Maynard Desktop Environment

The LXDE shell Raspbian ships with X on the Pi doesn’t support Wayland, while those shells that do (such as KDE and GNOME) are too heavyweight to run well on the Pi.

That's why the Raspberry Pi people have been working with Collabora to develop a lightweight Wayland shell, which they've christened Maynard (maintaining the tradition of New England placenames).

To install Maynard just execute these commands on your Raspberry Pi:

  1. Add "gpu_mem=128" and "dispmanx_offline=1" to /boot/config.txt

  2. Add "deb http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy web" and

    1. "deb http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy wayland" to /etc/apt/sources.list

  3. sudo apt-get update

  4. sudo apt-get install maynard

Once Maynard is installed you can just run it by typing

maynard

in a shell.

Some Internet Resources

Collabora GIT site: http://cgit.collabora.com/git/

Maynard on GitHub: https://github.com/raspberrypi/maynard/

Maynard Wiki: https://github.com/raspberrypi/maynard/wiki

Weston Raspberry on GitHub: https://github.com/raspberrypi/weston