Essential configuration

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Back to the introduction

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Here are a few tips for the initial configuration of the system:

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  1. Expand the usable space on the card: assuming you have not done it on the very first boot-up of the system. First check the available disk space by df -h. On my installation the root file system had a total of 1.8G, 1.5G of which were already in use. Not much room to manouver. The solution is to expand the root file system to all the space available on the 4GB card. This can be done at any time by running the raspberry configuration script from a terminal window: raspi-config. From the main menu select expand-rootfs. Now reboot your raspberry and after this operation I have 3.6G (2G free) on my system

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  2. Remote desktop into your Pi. In my very first booting of the system, I connected my keyboard and mouse directly to Pi, and used the secondary input of my LG screen: in this initial configuration the Pi system was a world on its own. In my second step post, I connected the card through the ethernet port and used a terminal connection (ssh user@raspberrypi) into my pi from my desktop computer. In this step I will illustrate how to set up a remote desktop connection (gui) into pi. A good article detailing some of these steps can also be found here.n
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    1. Install vnc server on Pi withn 
      nsudo apt-get tightvncserver install

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    2. remove and reinstall xorg byn 
      nsudo apt-get remove xorgnsudo apt-get install xorgn

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    3. This time thightvncserver worked fine and returned the session id for the seession to use when connect remotely. On the first run of the script, I also needed to set up a password for this remote connection. This password is needed by the svn client connecting to the server.

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    4. I installed a vnc client on my desktop (xfvnc) and connected to Pi usining the sugegsted session id.

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    5. I all works fine, but I suggest to avoid a full window session, because it is difficult to find the key combination to kill that window when finished

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