Raspberry Pi

What is it? well to save a lot of waffle from me you can find out more from:

 http://www.raspberrypi.org/

But to cut a long story short, the Pi is a small PC with an integrated CPU/GPU and 256mb Ram, 2xUSB, Ethernet port and HDMI output and a micro USB power input port. Currently what is available is a development board without a case but future builds will be in some form of case. All of this comes at the grand Price of £30 here in the UK. The idea is to provide a cheap PC that can be hooked up to a TV (reminiscent of the 80's PC's, Commodore, Sinclair ZX and the BBC micro to name 3), it is hoped that this will enable children to have access to a PC to develop their skills in hardware and software hacking.

Well I finally got my hands on one. The first thing to do was to install the OS onto a 4GB SD card which I purchased from a local store.

I chose to install the Debian Arm image which can be found here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

Having got the .img file it was time to write this to the SD card.

Having put the SD card into a reader attached to your Linux PC, you need to use the following command to install the image to the card:

sudo dd if=/home/tony/Downloads/debian6-19-04-2012/debian6-19-04-2012.img of=/dev/sd*

replacing (home/tony), with. (home/'your user name')

also you may need to change to directory from /Downloads to where you saved the file to if not in your downloads directory. Also the last part of the command dev/sd* you will need to replace the sd* with sd(and the letter denoting your SD card),

you can find the drive letter using the df -H command and you will get an output something like below:

tony@tony-ThinkCentre-M58 ~/Desktop $ df -H
Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              154G    83G    64G  57% /
none                   4.1G   717k   4.1G   1% /dev
none                   4.1G   1.2M   4.1G   1% /dev/shm
none                   4.1G   418k   4.1G   1% /var/run
none                   4.1G      0   4.1G   0% /var/lock
/dev/sdc1              501G   334G   167G  67% /media/My Passport
/dev/sdb1              248G   168G    68G  72% /media/6f25f153-eccf-47dc-8ee5-7b70c4882145

Look for a dev/sd* that corresponds to the size of your card, If you not sure run the command with the card out of the reader, then connect it and try again, the new entry in the output will be your SD card.

tony@tony-ThinkCentre-M58 ~/Desktop $ df -H
Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              154G    83G    64G  57% /
none                   4.1G   750k   4.1G   1% /dev
none                   4.1G   1.3M   4.1G   1% /dev/shm
none                   4.1G   418k   4.1G   1% /var/run
none                   4.1G      0   4.1G   0% /var/lock
/dev/sdc1              501G   334G   167G  67% /media/My Passport
/dev/sdb1              248G   168G    68G  72% /media/6f25f153-eccf-47dc-8ee5-7b70c4882145
/dev/sdf2              7.7G   1.3G   6.0G  18% /media/18c27e44-ad29-4264-9506-c93bb7083f47
/dev/sdf1               43M    29M    15M  68% /media/95F5-0D7A

in this case the /dev/sdf, don't put the number at the end as this is just the partition and the card will be reformatted during the write process.

After pressing return and inserting your password, go and make a coffee as it'll be about 20 minutes to write the image to the disc.

I'll go into what to do next, in my next post.

For a picture of the pi go to:  http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs