How to use a Raspberry Pi - Setting up the hardware, installing the Operating System

This is a tutorial about how to set up a raspberry pi in many different environments.
To start, we're going to need to gather some parts.
This is a soft list of what items you will need to set up a raspberry pi, but depending
upon the situation, you may need different components.
Of course, we need the raspberry pi, we need an SD card, that needs to be either a class
10 or better, a UHS class 1 or better, or a video class V10 or better.
We will need a 5 volt 2 amp power brick or better, the more amps the better, sometimes
they're labeled as two amps, and in other cases they are measured in milliamps, so you
need 2,000 milliamps or better.
You will need a USB mouse or keyboard, the mouse can also be bluetooth once we set it
up, and potentially you can also use a bluetooth keyboard, but sometimes the low level system
doesn't know how to handle wireless keyboards, so just be careful of that.
We will need a monitor, you can use one of the following - with all of the raspberry
pi models you can use an HDMI monitor, with the pi one you can use an RCA monitor on the
yellow jack that's on the top of the raspberry pi, on the pi 2 and the pi 3 though, you need
a converter cable which uses a tip - ring - ring - sleeve connector; that goes into
the audio jack and gives out the video connector, you can find those kinds of cables if you
look around online a little bit.
Also, if you're setting up the raspberry pi for the first time, you will need an internet
connection, to do that you can use either an ethernet cable, or with the pi one or the
pi two, you can use a USB WiFi dongle, which needs to have Linux kernel support so that
it actually works with the raspberry pi.
Or, if you have the pi three, you can also just use the builtin WiFi.
So now we're going to set up the SD card.
We're going to create a new fat32 partition.
Sometimes you'll need to make a new ms-dos partition table, if you're using Windows you
really don't have to worry about this, you just create a new fat32 partition.
You don't want to format it as NTFS because that will not work.
So here, I'm using GParted to format the partition, so that it is ready to go, and then we're
going to go and open the web browser next.
So if you go to Google, you can type in "berry boot" and then the first link there is the
berry boot version two bootloader, you can use this on all versions of the raspberry
pi, make sure to select the correct board, you can use the link on the bottom for the
pi two and the pi three, and the link on the top there for the original pi.
The top link will work for all pi's, but it doesn't take advantage of the pi two or the
pi three's quad core processor, so you will notice it will be very much slower.
So now that that's downloaded, we're going to extract the folder, and we're going to
copy all of the contents onto the SD card.
Then we will eject the SD card.
So first, we're going to install the SD card, on the pi one you should use a regular SD
card, and it will click, on the pi two, you push it in; the micro sd card; and it will
click, the pi three does not click when you plug in the sd card.
Next, we're going to plug in the HDMI cable into the video out port on the raspberry pi,
I've already plugged this into my monitor.
Next, we're going to plug in the ethernet cable.
If you have a good, crisp ethernet cable, you'll hear a click, when you plug it into
the port correctly.
After that, I'm going to plug the USB port of the raspberry pi into my USB hub, I'm using
a powered USB hub here, but you can just as well not use a USB hub.
My USB hub will also be providing power, so when I plug the USB cable in on the top of
the raspberry pi, into the USB hub, that is how I will be using power, however, you can
just as well plug in the power on the top of the raspberry pi into, like a phone charger
for example, that provides two amps.
And then, once you have done this, plug in your mouse and keyboard into the USB ports
on either your raspberry pi, or if you have a USB hub, and then plug in the power into
the wall outlet; and your raspberry pi will boot up as soon as you plug it into the wall;
there will be no power on or off switch, when you want to turn off the pi, you just make
sure to save all your files, and then you turn it off by unplugging it from the wall.
Now, we're going to install the SD card into the raspberry pi, and then we're going to
turn the rasbperry pi on.
You will be greeted by this screen here, which you can see now.
If you see a colored square in the upper right or if you see a power icon, that means that
the power you are giving it is not correct.
So we're going to select the timezone, we're going to select the SD card, which is often
called mmcblk0, just tell it to format the filesystem as ext4, and it's going to copy
all the parts of the disk to the correct areas.
This may take a minute, especially on larger SD cards.
Now we're going to select the debian rasbian image, the offical raspberry image, and then
I'm going to speed up the download part here, cause this takes a couple minutes; depending
upon your internet speed, it can take anywhere from a couple seconds to..
I've seen it take as much time as two hours on very bad connections, and you will generally
want a very stable connection to download this.
Sometimes it will pause a little bit, but just give it a minute and it will resume itself.
So now, it's going to make sure that all of the files are written to the disk properly,
you click OK, and then the computer will reboot itself into the new image.
So you'll be faced with a boot loader and it will automatically start to decide to count
down, you can just click boot and it will go much faster, but if you want to have other
operating systems, you can also just have them in that menu.
And now the rasbian image will begin to boot up.
First, it does a file system check, and then after that it starts up all the other parts
of the subsystem, there's going to be an error, where it can't resize the partition, but that's
OK, that doesn't really matter, especially, when you're using this particular bootloader,
it just will not happen, but it's already taken care of before hand, so that is perfectly
fine.
And now, we will see our brand new desktop.
The applications menu is up on the upper right, and that will get you going.

How to use a Raspberry Pi - Setting up the hardware, installing the Operating System

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