November 28 2015 – How to set up a MicroSD card for the Raspberry Pi

How to set up a MicroSD card for the Raspberry Pi

Join the Victoria PiMakers + Others MeetUp group
http://www.meetup.com/Victoria-Raspberry-PiMakers-And-Others/

The first step in getting your Raspberry Pi to work is to get a micro SD card with the correct boot-up information. The easiest way is to buy a pre-formatted SD card, but you also can do this by downloading a Linux image configured for the Pi (Raspbian) and copying it onto a blank micro SD. This presentation will show you how.

Bring a blank micro SD of at least 8GB capacity if you need help to set one up. Read more for setup instructions.

Installing Raspbian on an SD Card

Basics

  1. Download a Raspberry Pi image from “the internet”
  2. Copy (using a utility) the image to a micro-SD card of at least 8 GB.
  3. Put the micro-SD card in the Raspberry Pi and boot

Getting the Image

Where to get it? https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Select one of the images available. Raspbian is a full featured distro

Writing the image to the micro-SD card

The final desired state is to have an entire file system (with lots of
files) on the micro-SD card. When writing the image to the SD card, a
special copy is used. Depending on what your desktop/laptop operating
system is, you do it differently. Raspberry has good documentation to
do the special copy.

  • Windows: use Win32DiskImager
  • Linux: use dd (an included linux command)
  • Macintosh: use dd (an included BSD command)

Booting the Image

Once the writing of the micro-SD card is complete, remove it from the
SD card reader/writer, place it into the Raspberry Pi, and power up the
Pi.
Log into Pi:
login: pi

password: raspberry

Type ‘startx‘ to start the
graphical interface

Have Fun!


Pi Makers & Others, 28 November 2015