The primary purpose of an operating system is to provide a consistent software platform, regardless of the underlying hardware. Once the operating system is installed, it can be expanded with many other software packages.
Raspbian is a good example of a Linux-based operating system. As Raspbian is based on Debian, it has access to its huge software repository. Raspbian initially had access to over 35,000 different software packages in the Debian repositories, but this number keeps growing.
Debian Wheezy, on which Raspbian is based, doesn't officially support the older ARMV6 CPU in the Raspberry Pi. During initial development of Raspbian in 2012, the developers spent a huge amount of time recompiling the vast collection of software in the Debian repositories for the ARMv6K architecture to get maximum performance out of the Raspberry Pi.
This chapter runs through several different methods of installing software on your Raspberry Pi.
There are many different tools available to manage software on a Linux distribution. Some of these include the APT and RPM package managers.
Raspbian uses the Advanced Packaging Tool, also known as the APT. The APT handles the dependencies of any package. Installation and removal of software packages are handled by an application called dpkg. It is the recommended way to install any software on your Raspberry Pi. Every part of Raspbian is bundled into a package.
The APT can automatically download the software that you want to install from repositories that are preconfigured. A repository is a collection of precompiled software that can be installed. These repositories are automatically selected, based on your location, to maximize download speed. It also automatically handles updates of all the software packages that are installed on your Raspberry Pi. The APT was first released in 1998 and is often hailed as one of Debian's best features.