Notes on Setting Up a Pi

I encountered the following issues in setting up my Pi:

• Downloading the Rasbian image from www.raspberrypi.org/downloads:
  • It is big, don't expect an instant download.
  • Use a machine with a big disk, because you'll need to unzip it.
  • Get an SD card, at least 2GB -- these days, 8GB cards are cheap!
  • Follow the instructions for using dd (Mac/Linux) or Win32DiskImager (that other operating system).
  • But note! To do that, you may need system administrator privileges -- that is to say, the instructions work if you do things on your own computer, but may not work on departmental computers.
  • But note! Furthermore, you need an SD card drive on the computer you're using for the download. They're cheap. Some SD cards come prepackaged with SD to USB adapters, but in a pinch, you can buy the adapter for about $2 from many sources.
  • Install the SD card on a Raspberry Pi, and power up.

• On first power-up, an application called raspi-config should run.
  • If it does not auto-launch, or if, later, you want to change some configuraiton options, open the LXTerminal application (double click its icon) and type this shell command:
      sudo raspi-config
    Navigation in raspi-config uses the up and down arrow keys to select options and the left and right arrow keys to switch between <Select> and <Finish> or <Candel>. Use the Enter key to make it take the indicated action. raspi-config is slow and clunky, but easy to use.
  • Use the 1 Expand Filesystem option the first time you power up, in order to get access to your full SD card. Never use it again on that SD card.
  • Use the 2 Change User Password option if you want to password-protect your PI. Unlike shared systems, you may find that physical custody of a pocket-sized machine suffices; if you do not set a password, do disable remote ssh (an advanced option).
  • Use the 3 Enable Boot to Desktop/Scratch option to enable boot to desktop. Boot to scratch makes sense only for elementary-school programming courses, and boot to shell is only for people who hate using mice.
  • Use the 4 Internationalization Options option to: Set the locale to En-US -- it defaults to En-GB (British English) which is not really a problem. More importantly, use set the timezone to your local time zone. There are also keyboard settings you can adjust, if you are lucky enough to have a keyboard that is in the list.
  • Use the 7 Overclock option lets you overclock your machine. The default is 700 MHz. With no heat sinks, it is most probably safe to run at 800 MHz, even on a borrowed machine. Running at 900 MHz is probably safe, and if you add a heat sink to your machine, you add a safety margin. The machine can be pushed to 1000 MHz which is 1 GHz; don't do this unless you own the machine. Overclocking may draw more power, so you may need a a bigger power supply, especially if you have USB peripherals such as Wifi or hard drives. Note that clock automatically throttles down if the CPU chip gets hot, so a CPU heat sink can improve performance.
  • Use the 8 Advanced Options for:
    • A1 Overscan is needed if your monitor has trouble showing the screen borders (as on old CRT video monitors) or if excessive black borders show around the edge.
    • A2 Hostname is needed if you want to be able to ssh into your machine from outside, particularly if there are multiple Raspberry Pi machines on the local net.
    • A4 SSH is needed to disable the ssh server. You don't want this eenabled unless you intend to set up a server. If you leave the ssh server enabled, you must set a password!

• The default key map is British! EEK, two nations divided by a common language:
  Try to type \ and you get #, which makes C preprocessor commands, C control characters and shell comments hard to type.
  • You need to edit /etc/default/keyboard
  • This file require kernel privileges to edit so use (for example):
    sudo vi /etc/default/keyboard
  • Change two letters so that XKBLAYOUT="gb" reads XKBLAYOUT="us"

• Keep your system up to date.
  • Open LXTerminal and type these two shell commands:
      sudo apt-get update -- to find what needs updating
      sudo apt-get upgrade -- to install the updates
    The latter will ask for permission before it makes any changes.
  • The less frequently you do this, the longer the commands will take. It may take a while on first startup because there may have been a fair number of updates made since the disk image you started with was put on line. It may take a while on first startup because there may have been a fair number of updates made since the disk image you started with was put on line.
  • Sometimes, sudo apt-get upgrade will not upgrade some packages, saying the following packages have been kept back. This means that installing the current version of one of the held-back packages requires de-installing (and replacing) something else. The following command will do this:
      sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
  • Make regular backups, for example, to a USB thumb drive or using scp to a network file server.

• But the software I need for ... is missing!
  • It comes with Vi, but I prefer to use Emacs!
    Open LXTerminal and type this:
      sudo apt-get install emacs
    Note that emacs is a notorious resource hog, and also note that there are numerous subsidiary packages available for emacs.
  • I want to play MP3 files on the Raspberry!
    If the mpg123 command isn't already installed, open LXTerminal and type this:
      sudo apt-get install mpg123
    Now, the command mpg123 f.mp3 will play an mp3 file. You can make the GUI file manager launch mpg123 when you click on an MP3 file, or you could write a script to work through .m3u playlists.
  • But wher's the volume control?
    Type mpg123 (without arguments) to see your options.
    Try the amixer shell command. It has a man page!

Posted Dec 7, 2012, last modified Jul 28, 2014 using my Raspberry Pi.