How to Verify the Presence of Raspbian OS on a Raspberry Pi Running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

This article provides instructions for checking if your Raspberry Pi is running the Raspbian operating system on Amazon Web Services. It also explains how to access the terminal and run commands to ve …


Updated October 10, 2023

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This article provides instructions for checking if your Raspberry Pi is running the Raspbian operating system on Amazon Web Services. It also explains how to access the terminal and run commands to verify the installation.

  1. Log in to your AWS Management Console and navigate to the EC2 Dashboard.

  2. Select the instance of your Raspberry Pi from the list of instances, and then click “Connect” to access it via SSH (Secure Shell). Make sure you have the necessary permissions to connect to the instance.

  3. Once connected, run the following command in the terminal:

cat /etc/os-release

This command will display information about the operating system running on your Raspberry Pi. Look for the “PRETTY_NAME” line, which should show “Raspbian GNU/Linux”. If it shows a different name, you may not have the correct OS installed.

  1. To verify that the Raspbian OS is up to date, run:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

This command will check for updates and install them if any are available. If everything is working correctly, you should see output indicating that your system is up to date.

  1. To confirm the version of Raspbian installed on your Raspberry Pi, run:
cat /etc/debian_version

This command will display the version number, which should match the latest release (as of writing this article, it’s “buster”). If the output shows a different version, you may need to update your OS.

  1. To ensure that your Raspberry Pi has all the necessary packages for running Raspbian, run:
sudo apt install raspberrypi-sys-mods -y

This command will install any missing packages related to the Raspberry Pi system modules.

  1. To verify that your Raspberry Pi is configured with the correct kernel, run:
uname -a

The output should show “armv7l” or “armv6l” as the machine hardware name, indicating it’s a Raspberry Pi running on ARM architecture.

  1. Finally, to check if your Raspberry Pi is using the default hostname (raspberrypi), run:
hostname

If the output shows “raspberrypi”, you have successfully verified that your Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian on AWS. If not, consider re-imaging your instance with the correct OS image.

Remember that these steps assume you are using an official Raspbian image for AWS. Custom images or modified systems may require additional checks to verify their compatibility with Raspbian.