soft-float debian wheezy and debian wheezy

Question

I've been instructed to load ubuntu on a raspberry file. I was told

"The Ubuntu image for the Raspberry pi called ‘Soft-float Debian wheezy'

Is that different from the Debian Wheezy I see on the raspberrypi.org downloads link?

Is that the same?

If its not the same where can i download the soft float debian wheezy?

EDIT: I believe the author's intent is to ask:

I've been instructed to load 'soft-float Debian Wheezy' onto my Raspberry Pi computer. However, when I search for 'soft-float Debian Wheezy' I am not able to find any distributions with exactly that name.

Is there a difference between 'Debian Wheezy' and 'Soft-Float Debian Wheezy'?

Can I install 'Debian Wheezy' and then apply an update and/or install something to make a 'soft-float' version of Debian Wheezy?

Answer 1

For earlier raspberry pi models (not ARMv7+), you will want soft float. Otherwise known as armel

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/wheezy/main/installer-armel/current/images/versatile/netboot/

This is not Ubuntu! It is a very basic command line version of Debian, the newer one (jessie) is here http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/jessie/main/installer-armel/current/images/versatile/netboot

Answer 2

No current version of Ubuntu can run on the Raspberry Pi. Ubuntu only support later ARM architectures.

Debian soft-float is no longer available for download from raspberrypi.org. The last version they had is mirrored at ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/debian/7/2013-05-29-wheezy-armel/2013-05-29-wheezy-armel.zip

Raspbian (rather cheekily called Debian Wheezy) is a recompilation of the Debian packages for hard-float. It is not soft-float and as far as I'm aware is not supported by Debian.

Answer 3

It is important to understand the "Ubuntu" and "Debian" and "Debian Wheezy" and "Raspbian" are the names of different GNU/Linux distributions.

A "distribution" is a particular set of files used to install that version or "flavor" of GNU/Linux.

The next important thing to understand is that when you say "raspberry file" what you probably mean is a "Raspberry Pi" - and this is a particular computer - the hardware part only.

So, what you are likely attempting to do is install the soft-float version of Debian Wheezy onto your Raspberry Pi computer.

As noted above by @joan:

Raspbian is the more formal name for Debian Wheezy. You can find the official website for Raspbian at raspbian.org.

Further, @joan states that the soft-float version of this GNU/Linux distribution is no longer a currently released version, and by visiting the FTP site in her answer, you can get the older version.

The raspbian.org website also includes a brief FAQ document that explains a bit about soft-float binary code vs. hard-float in regard to how these are methods for mathematical operations and how they implemented - which might impact the compatibility or performance of the programs you want to run on the computer.