Installing & Setting up a Raspberry PI

Raspberry Pi is one of the cheapest single board computer with decent spec at lowest cost among. Steps of installing it are pretty simple.

First get your Pi. Install the OS. Here we can use the Debian derivative Raspbian, optimised for PI.

You can download Rasbian(Debian Wheezy version) maintained by raspberry foundation from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads to your Download folder. Now take a memory card, insert it into your existing Gnu/Linux OS. Find the device name. Mostly name will be 'sdb'. If you are not sure don't take a risk. Use your disk manager or Gpart edit to ensure the name.

Then open your terminal, use the command either "su" or "sudo su" to become the root user. Use cd command to change the directory.

Here it will be like :

cd Downloads

Then enter the following command.

dd bs=1M if=2015-02-16-raspbian-wheezy.img of=/dev/sdb

It will take about 10 to 20 min to finish. Now the card is ready to boot. Insert the card and turn on your Pi after making all connections. At the first boot it will prompt the basic setting like locale, keyboard layout etc. Chose command prompt as default booting option. This will help you for better performance. Connect your network cable and reboot the pi.

You will be asked for user name and password. Username is "pi" and password is "raspberry". You can start the graphical user interface by using the command "startx". Now the graphical interface loads.