  This month's cover DVD is all about everybody's favourite £25 credit card sized computer - is there more than one that fits that description? Yes, it's Raspberry Pi time. This issue of Linux Format features several distros for the Pi, so we have them on this month's cover DVD. As we have yet to see a Raspberry Pi with a bootable DVD drive attached, although I'm sure someone has hacked such a beast, the distros are supplied as compressed image files. These need to be unpacked with a suitable (un)archiver for the format, some use zip and others use .tar, and the resulting image file copied to an SD (or microSD if you have a Raspberry Pi Model B+) card with dd. After determining the deive assigned to your SD card, usually /dev/sdb if you have only one hard drive in your computer, copy it like this
sudo dd if=/path/to/imagefile of=/dev/sdX bs=4k
sync
The exception is NOOBS, which makes life much easier. With this, you simply unpack the archive into the SD card's root directory. Once copied, and make sure the copy has completely finished by waiting for sync to complete before removing the card, put the card in your Pi and boot from it.
If you try to boot the DVD in your normal PC, you will see a message telling you that this is not such a good idea, along with a single option, to run memtest86, which is always on our DVDs. That is not the only non-Pi software on this DVD. We still have all the software and files to go with the other content of the magazine. This includes everything covered in our Hot Picks and Round Up reviews along with code required to work along with our tutorials.
Neil Bothwick
DVD Editor
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