There’s a lot of stuff you can do with the Raspberry Pi – a fully-functional computer the size of a credit card that costs only $25. However, multi-booting isn’t really one of them.
With the way the system is designed, you can only boot a single operating system per SD card, which can get more than a little limiting if you’re not willing to shell out for additional cards.
Thankfully, a (free) solution exists: Berryboot, a boot management utility designed for Raspberry Pi. Using it, you’ll be able to boot multiple operating systems off of a single SD card. These operating systems can be configured either to be stored on the SD card itself or on an attached hard drive, in which case the card will simply function as a launcher.
As far as the installation is concerned, Berryboot is a fairly straightforward application. Simply download the installer, and extract the contents of the .ZIP file to a FAT-formatted SD card. This card will be utilized as your multi-boot platform. From here, it’s simply a matter of plugging the SD card into your Raspberry Pi and running the installer. You should be able to get through the installation process more or less unaided, so we won’t spend any more time on it.
Once you’ve gotten everything properly set up, you can start installing different distros to boot from. Note that if you want to install them to an external hard drive or USB drive, you’ll need to have said drive plugged in during the setup process. Beyond that, the GUI shouldn’t take you all that much to figure out.
Berryboot includes a whole host of Pi-optimized Linux distros with the download(via How To Geek):
- BerryWebserver (Webserver Bundle: Lighttpd + PHP + SQLITE)
- Berry Terminal (LTSP/Edubuntu Thinclient)
- Raspbian (Debian Wheezy)
- MemTester
- OpenElec (Media Center Software)
- Puppy Linux
- RaspRazor (Unofficial Rasbian branch, lots of programming tools)
- Sugar (The One-Laptop-Per-Child OS)
In addition, you can add your own distributions as well, either through converting the images to SquashFS and importing them or through downloading Pi-optimized images to the SD card. The former tends to be a bit more difficult and involved a process, and requires a bit of tinkering with the command line, unfortunately. Unless you’re fairly confident in your abilities with the Linux platform, I’d recommend against attempting it. If you’re still dead-set on the process, you can find a step-by-step guide at How To Geek. Otherwise, just stick with what you’ve got. It’s not like you won’t have choices, after all: as you can see, you’ll be able to select a number of the most popular Linux distros currently available.
via LifeHacker
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superb… work