Raspberry Pi A, User Manual, Page: 61 / 314

C H A P T E R 3
L I N U X S Y S T E M A D M I N I S T R A T I O N
45
❍
rmdir —By itself,
rm
cannot usually remove directories. As a result,
rmdir
is provided
to delete directories once they have been emptied of files by
rm
.
❍
mkdir
—The opposite of
rmdir
, the
mkdir
command creates new directories. For
example, typing
mkdir myfolder
at the terminal will create a new directory called
myfolder
under the current working directory. As with
cd
, directories provided to
the command can be relative or absolute.
Introducing Raspbian
Raspbian is the name given to a customised variant of the popular Debian Linux distribu-
tion. Debian is one of the longest-running Linux distributions, and concentrates on high
compatibility and excellent performance even on modest hardware—making it a great part-
ner for the Raspberry Pi. Raspbian takes Debian as its base, or
parent distribution , and adds
custom tools and software to make using the Raspberry Pi as easy as possible.
To keep the download size to a minimum, the Raspberry Pi image for Raspbian includes only
a subset of the software you’d find on a regular desktop version. This includes tools for
browsing the web, programming in Python and using the Pi with a GUI. Additional software
can be quickly installed through the use of the distribution’s package manager,
apt
, or pur-
chased through the Raspberry Pi Store link on the desktop. Raspbian includes a desktop
environment known as the
Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) . Designed to offer
an attractive user interface using the X Window System software, LXDE provides a familiar
point-and-click interface that will be immediately accessible to anyone who has used
Windows, OS X or other GUI-based operating systems in the past.
TIP
The GUI doesn’t load by default in most Raspberry Pi distributions, and Raspbian is no
exception. To quickly load it and leave the text-based console behind, log in, type
startx
and then press the Enter key. To return to the console, while leaving the GUI running in the
background, hold down Ctrl + Alt and press F1 before releasing all three keys.
If you’re using the recommended Raspbian distribution, you’ll find that you have plenty of
preinstalled software to get started. While hardly an exhaustive example of the software
available for the Pi, which numbers in the thousands of
packages , it’s a good introduction to
precisely what the system can do.
The software provided with the Raspbian distribution is split into themed categories. To view
these categories, left-click the menu icon, the arrow located on the bottom-left of the screen
in LXDE (see Figure 3-1).