Raspberry Pi Madness...

When my first Raspberry Pi (RPi)was finally delivered, I decided I wasn't going to blog too much about it. There are plenty of well written, and self explanatory blogs out there which are very helpful and informative.

Since then, I have ordered two more RPi's and tried various distributions.

Whilst playing, I found there were certain tasks which I performed on every build regardless of the distribution.

During a conversation with a friend, the only other RPi owner I know personally (We geeks are a rare breed) I realised that some of the tasks I consider run of the mill may not be that obvious to some people.

So the objective of this blog is to discuss some of the steps I take when I first build a new image on the RPi. To keep things simple, I'm going to use the Rasbian image as an example, but most of these steps are applicable to other distributions. (also on other Linux based machines).

First some ground rules, I have written this blog from my home point of view. Personally I no longer use Windows on any of the machines I own. (my work laptop belongs to my company, so is the exception.) Therefore all my set-up steps are performed on Linux based machines. If you intend to follow this blog as a guide, you will need to use Linux PC. If you don't currently have one, I suggest searching for one of the many LiveCD distributions or create a Linux image on a USB drive.(http://www.pendrivelinux.com/)
If not, refer to one of the many other guides aimed at Windows users.

Also to avoid this turning into a mammoth blog, I'm going to fragment it into sections.

This section will cover downloading your image file. ;-)

So for this you can open your favourite browser and go to the downloads page and select your preferred image.
At the time of writing, this is currently found here;
http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/raspbian/2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian/2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.zip 

Once you down load the file, it is always a good idea to check you downloaded the file without any errors. You can do this with the following command;

sha1sum ~/2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.zip

This will give you a checksum value which you can check against the download directory.
 For the supplied image it should be;

SHA-1 3ee33a94079de631dee606aebd655664035756be

This also confirms to important facts, 1) the file was downloaded correctly. 2) the file is the same as the file uploaded by the image provider.

It is possible to skip this step, but it can save time later if you know your image file is not corrupt!

Next, it is VERY important you know where this file is located.

I normally transfer the zipped file to a raspberry directory in my home folder.
My directory path is ~/RaspberryPi/

You will need to know this when we transfer the image to a SD card, but for now we need to unzip the image file. This can be done using the "extract here" option in your file manager (nautilus) but I prefer to do things in CLI as shown below;

For those of you who like to cut + paste the command is;

unzip 2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.zip

at this point you should have the 2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img file in you ~/RaspberryPi/ directory.
 

Now we need to get this image onto a SD card. I'll cover this off in my next blog.