First contact with the Raspberry Pi

I just received my Raspberry Pi today (May 3^rd, 2013  - 24 days after purchase).

The Raspberry Pi is inside the pink box.

This post is gathering my first experience and describe how to install and connect a RPi to the network.


The first thing to do will be to prepare a SD card with Linux:

Step 1: Download Raspian from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
Step 2: Install Raspian on the SD Card thanks to the following commands (In a Linux PC of course):

• Check the hash to be sure to have the good and unaltered image. It should be: b4375dc9d140e6e48e0406f96dead3601fac6c81 

sha1sum 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.zip

• Unzip the  downloaded archive

unzip 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.zip 

• Write the image into the disk 

dd if=2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdb

These operations took time to be completed so let's did some handwork and attached the RPi to its very well designed pink delivery box.

The SD Card is ready. The RPi is thought to it case. Let plug it and... start...

RPi plugged from everywhere

Here it is! My new Linux machine is starting. At first boot rasp-config start immediately. It looks like this:

Screenshot from adafruit

For the initial configuration, I did go through all the steps to configure a system to run with my French keyboard with 16MB of memory for the video and not starting desktop. I did activate ssh and change the pi user password.

Note: reboot is required when rootfs is resized.

Now I just have to configure a fixed IP address to boot faster and to be able to remove all the unnecessary peripheral: mouse, keyboard and screen.

Adding a fix IP is done by modifying the file /etc/network/interfaces as follow:
        auto lo
        iface lo inet loopback
        auto eth0
        iface eth0 inet static
                address 192.168.0.123
                netmask 255.255.255.0
                network 192.168.0.0
                broadcast 192.168.0.255
                gateway 192.168.0.254
        #allow-hotplug wlan0
        #iface wlan0 inet manual
        #wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
        #iface default inet dhcp

I did add a fixed IP and comment out the IP related to the Wi-Fi.

Then we have to define the DNS which will be used by the RPi by updating the file /etc/resolv.conf and follow:

      nameserver 192.168.0.254

I agree, ssh is quite limited in term of look'n feel so but it is so efficient ;-). But, to have a better user interface, we will use the standard web 2.0 technology.  This will be the subject of a new post but curious people can still follow the GitHub link on the right and see a preview of what I'll present in a future post.