How do I get the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS Buster for 4?

Question

I am starting a project to create a digital photo frame and want to use pi3d for displaying photos. Pi3D is compatible with only Buster and not Bullseye or bookworm. I would like to get the latest buster based OS which can run on the pi 4 (4GB). I could find multiple pages on raspberrypi.org (1, 2) with the images but I don't know which is which version.

I do not mind looking at the folders on the website one by one, downloading them all and looking at a config file or something but I don't know which file to look at. Other than installing one by one or doing some guesswork based on the OS release date on wiki (they don't exactly match), how do I get a compatible version for Raspberry Pi 4 (and also the ZeroW, for another project)?

Answer 1

You may find https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_armhf/ more suitable (this does not have all the optional packages and is smaller).

Specifically https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_armhf/images/raspios_armhf-2021-05-28/2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf.zip

Answer 2

If you click on those folders, inside you'll find a listing like this:

[   ]   2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-full.info   2021-05-07 16:23    288K     
[   ]   2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-full.zip    2021-05-07 16:35    2.8G     
[   ]   2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-full.zip.sha1   2021-05-28 15:49    83   
[   ]   2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-full.zip.sha256 2021-05-28 15:49    107  
[   ]   2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-full.zip.sig    2021-05-28 15:00    488  
[   ]   2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-full.zip.torrent    2021-05-28 15:50    28K  

Obviously enough, this is a buster image -- and the next directory chronologically (2021-11-08) contains bullseye, so this is the last buster.

These are 32-bit but that should be fine. The Pi 4 was released in 2019 so an appropriate kernel and firmware should be there.

The actual image is in the big .zip file. You should probably run apt update; and apt -y dist-upgrade once installed, since there may be a few security updates, etc from after that was released (not sure if they keep up with Debian this way).