Setting up the Raspberry PI.

Once I had scavenged all the bits I needed to boot my Pi up I still needed to put the Operating System on it to get going.

A few easy steps...



1) Flashing the SD Card.

I used the download Debian Squeeze image from here - http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

Then I followed the instructions here to put it on my SD card - http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup
I used the instructions for the Win32DiskImager.exe program. It was all very easy.

I used the Debian Squeeze image that is recommended for beginers.

It all booted fine so I was lucky. I know some SD cards can have issues and if this happens to you Google around to find a number of solutions that might help.

2) Re-sizing the partition for a larger than 2GB SD card.

Since I am using an 8GB card I decided to expand the partition so that the Pi could use more of the card for data. Also, I don't have a Linux machine to mount the card and expand in a nice user interface so I had to do it on the Pi itself. I think a lot of other people will be in the same boat and don't have another Linux machine to mount the SD card on. Although the instructions make it sound that it will be difficult to do manually on the Pi itself I can assure you it turned out to be very easy.

To do it I followed the instructions here - http://elinux.org/RPi_Resize_Flash_Partitions

In particular the section under "Manually resizing the SD card on Raspberry Pi".

A little note on the instructions that might help...

• d, 3 to delete the swap partition

Means "press D then <enter>" then "press 3 then <enter>".

• n p 2 to create a new primary partition

Means "press N then <enter>", "press P then <enter>", "press 2 then <enter>"

Just in case a novice gets confused as the instructions given are aimed at a novice.

All up and running with the girls getting very excited.