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You're reading from Learning Raspbian

Product typeBook

Published inFeb 2015

Reading LevelBeginner

Publisher

ISBN-139781784392192

Edition1st Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Raspbian

Concepts

Single Board Computers

Author (1)

William Harrington

Chapter 2. Getting Started with Raspbian

Now that you know a bit more about Raspbian, it is time to get started. The first thing that you need to do is plug in your Raspberry Pi and then install Raspbian onto an SD card. This process is different from installing software onto your Windows PC or Mac.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

SD card specifications
Downloading Raspbian
Imaging Raspbian onto your SD card

SD card specifications

It is recommended that your SD card has the following specifications:

Capacity	At least 8 GB
Class	Class 4 is minimum but class 10 is recommended

Note

Make sure that you get the correct SD card. Raspberry Pi A and Raspberry Pi B both use a full-sized SD card. Raspberry Pi B+ uses a mini SD card.

It is highly recommended that you don't run your Raspberry Pi without an SD card. This is because all the hardware on your Raspberry Pi will not be set up correctly. This might lead to the damage of your Raspberry Pi hardware.

Downloading Raspbian

Now that you have got all the hardware, you need to get your Raspberry Pi up and running. It is time to get the Raspbian image. You can download the Raspbian image from several places. The easiest place from which you can download this is directly from the Raspberry Pi Foundation website at http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/.

The official Raspbian download page

On this page, you will see links to all the official operating systems supported by the Foundation. We are interested in the Raspbian image. If you are able to download the image from a BitTorrent client, you can help the Foundation save some bandwidth. If you can't do this, simply download the zip file.

At the time of writing this book, the latest version of Raspbian is based on Debian Wheezy, which was released in January 2015. The download itself is just over 800 MB. When you have downloaded the file, you need to extract the image from the zip file. How you do this depends on the operating system that you are...

Imaging Raspbian onto your SD card

The file that you have just downloaded is an exact replica of the all the contents of an SD card. For this reason, you can't simply copy the file onto the SD card and be up and running. To copy Raspbian onto your SD card, you need to write the image directly to your SD card. The process to do this varies depending on your operating system.

Writing the image using Windows

To write the Raspbian image to an SD card using Windows, you need a software program that is capable of performing the task. There are several programs available, but we will be using a program called Win32 Disk Imager. Win32 Disk Imager is an open source tool designed to write image files to a removable storage device such as an SD card or USB drive. You can get Win32 Disk Imager from http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/. Its icon will look like the following:

The steps to be performed for writing the image using Windows are as follows:

The first step is to insert the SD card...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned where to download the Raspbian image from. You also stepped through how to write the Raspbian image to your SD card using several different operating systems. The next chapter will show you how to set up your Raspberry Pi and configure Raspbian.

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Learning Raspbian

Published in: Feb 2015Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781784392192

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Author (1)

William Harrington

William Harrington lives and works at his family's cattle station, Olga Downs, in northwest Queensland, Australia. He attended university at James Cook University, Townsville. At the age of 20, he established his own company, Harrington Systems Electronics, which sells the NLIS RFID tag reader The Pipe Reader that he designed and manufactures. He also received the AgForce President's Innovation Award in 2005. In 2006, he graduated with honors as a computer systems engineer and received the Queensland Primary Industries Young Achiever Award. Since then, he has gone on to design the uSee remote monitoring system, a revolutionary and low-cost remote monitoring solution. Having a home-based company has become part of a unique diversification strategy for the family and has provided them the opportunity to stay on the land. Due to a never-ending passion for technology, William speaks regularly on many topics, so he will bring a futuristic version of the technology that is possible in the next decade. Since 2011, he has also been a director and programmer for Farm Apps Pty Ltd, developing smartphone and tablet apps that increase farming efficiency. He enjoys travelling and brewing beer at home. William works alongside his wife Hollie, having recently welcomed their young son, Jack, into the world.
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