Received the Raspberry Pi

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Back to the introduction

Today I have finally received the raspberry pi and its components by mail and I am preparing for the first step: creating an image of the wheezy raspbian distribution to copy on the memory card.

This is the download site, and these are the instructions to follow to prepare the card in a Linux environment.

    1. Download the wheezy package from the download site
    2. Compare the SHA-1 checksum from the download site with your downloaded file by executing this from command line, after entering the directory containing your downloaded file:n 
      sha1sum file.zip

      n where file.zip is the name of your downloaded file. If the checksums are different you need to start from the beginning.

    3. Unzip the downloaded file by performingn 
      unzip file.zip

      n the result is a file with name file.img

    4. Insert the SD memory card purchased in an available slot of yourn PC / laptop (laptop in my case)
    5. Check the file systems mounted by performing: df -h
    6. Figure out which mount point corresponds to your card, let’s say /dev/sdb1, and unmount it by

      umount /dev/sdb1

    7. Now you need to copy the image file to your card, using the linux dd command. In my case this is performed by
        dd bs=4M if=2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdb

Be careful of what you type above, and be sure of the output file system (/dev/sdb), since this operation is destructive of whatever found on that output file system path. This process might required to be run as super user (sudo) and does not give any diagnostic. Also remove the partition number at the end of the output device (/dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1), so that the image affects the entire SD card and not only one partition of it. Be prepared to wait for a few minutes.

Before removing the card, from the command line, run sync, to make sure that everything in the write cash is dumped onto the card.

You can now remove the card. It is ready to be inserted in your Raspberry Pi

In the next step with will fire-up Pi