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I recently bought a RPi and it came with Debian, which I think is a Linux distribution. I'm more used to Windows; can I install it?

ramblinjan
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Alex Chamberlain
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10 Answers10

34

No. At this point in time, Windows cannot be installed on the Raspberry Pi.

Windows is designed for the x86 and x86-64 architectures (32 and 64 bit architecture respectively).

The RPi has an ARM architecture, which is incompatible.

Windows 10

Microsoft have announced that Windows 10 will ship a version that supports Raspberry Pi 2.

Alex Chamberlain
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Windows 8 will have an ARM version known as "WinRT" so the question isn't quite as outlandish as it might seem. But it RasPi uses an earlier ARM version than that targeted by WinRT (technologically the RaspPi isn't anywhere leading edge - one reason for the price), so it will not run WinRT.

Also even if the ARM architectures matched, I suspect WinRT would have memory requirements that would give the RasPi trouble.

winwaed
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Nope, because Windows isn't compiled for ARM (and not being open source, you can't do it yourself.)

Yes, Windows 8 is apparently going to have an ARM version, though I seriously doubt it will work for a few main reasons:

  • Drivers for all the components would have to be written, licensed and released
  • I seriously doubt Windows 8 will run at all with 256MB RAM
  • Even if it did technically compile and run with drivers, it'd likely be unusable in terms of speed because of its hardware requirements.

It's technically possible that if a future "model C" were to be released (I'm just speculating) the hardware requirements may be good enough, alleviating some of the above issues - but from a practical perspective I don't think running Windows is ever going to be hugely feasible.

berry120
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5

Well, someone has managed to get Windows 7 running on the Raspberry Pi, albeit via VMWare View Open Client. You can find more information about it on the Raspberry Pi Foundation's blog post.

And finally, Warrington Collegiate have been working on getting Windows 7 (!) running on the Raspberry Pi using the VMware View Open Client. We think they’re the first people to have done this – they’re calling it Magnum Pi, because we all love moustaches and Hawaiian shirts. Nick Smeltzer, their Director of IT Services emailed me to say that Microsoft already know about it…

You can download it from Microsoft SkyDrive.

winwaed
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A group of people got Windows 7 running on the RPi through the VMware Open Client. Link: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/magnum-pi. Scroll down to the bottom.

TiberiumFusion
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You can run Windows Embedded Compact 7 on a Raspberry Pi.

A BSP for the RPi is available at Codeplex.

Mikael Dúi Bolinder
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Now you can run Windows 10 IoT Core on your Raspberry Pi 2 B:

https://ms-iot.github.io/content/GetStarted.htm

You need to have Windows 10 Technical Preview installed on your PC.

CCovey
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Maybe ReactOS (kind of an open source Windows+Linux-merge-reimplementation) is interesting for you, there seems to exist an ARM port. The discussion there also refers to Wine for ARM with "native" x86 support...

Tobias Kienzler
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so you can't actually download windows on raspberry pi only if you have a USB boot stick

user68772
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I have the solution just like osmc or aosp os why don't create an os that only runs emulator For example the os will be such that when you open it you will only get qemu emulator or wine or whatever emulator you want that support to run win And viola you get to run Windows on rpi 3

As simple as child's play

Salaazar
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