Desktop Raspian
My 10-year-old Windows laptop won’t last forever, so I’d like to gain experience of Linux in the meantime to keep my options open. The Raspberry Pi is a tempting route into the world of Linux, but for me the crucial aspect of the Pi is Raspian.
Having already partitioned my laptop’s HD to make room for a version of Linux, I wonder if Raspian can be installed only on a Pi, or is it possible to use Raspian to create a dual-boot setup on another computer such as my creaky laptop? David Francis, via email
Jonni says
Getting a decade out of a laptop is pretty impressive, and some of them just keep on tickin’. However, older machines tend to be inefficient, slow, noisy and, in the laptop case, experience ever-depleting battery life.
I have good news. The new Raspberry Pi desktop, Pixel was made available for x86 hardware last year. The Foundation seem to be avoiding calling it Raspbian, but the image you can download below amounts to the same thing: it’s Debian Jessie running the Pixel desktop with almost all the same apps (sans Minecraft and
Mathematica for commercial reasons). Find it at www. raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-desktop
It should be ideal for older hardware, and if you’re running Windows XP on your laptop I would heartily recommend that you move to Linux sooner rather than later. Best of luck!