Set up Operating System for Raspberry Pi

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Here is a detail steps to set up the operating system for Raspberry Pi.

1. Download the OS image file into your PC.

- Go to this URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
- The OS image I downloaded was: Soft-float Debian “wheezy” because I want to run JAVA.
- The exact file I download was: 2012-08-08-wheezy-armel.zip

2. Use a utility to put the OS image into the SD card

- The tools recommended by official site is Win32DiskImager
- Official start up guide told you that you can download it from here: https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+download
- I followed the link and it seems like the download file is gone, instead it gives you another 2 links, I picked the second link, which is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
- So I finally got the utility but it doesn’t work. The drop down to pick the target SD Card drive does not allow me to pick my SD Card drive, which is G: so I gave up.
- I tried another utility called WinFlashTool URL: http://winflashtool.sysprogs.com/
- This one works great, I used it to flash the SD Card with the image 2012-08-08-wheezy-armel.img
winflashtool_ss1

3. Plug the SD card into Raspberry, hook up everything and power it up by plug in the AC adapter.

4. The first thing you will see after the start up is the rasp-config screen.

 expand_rootfs

  • I adjusted the configurations for: expand_rooft, change_pass, change_locale, change_timezone, just follow the instructions on screen to complete the configuration.

5. After that it asked for restart, I just accepted it and it rebooted. The only thing worth mention here is that this step took very long time to run:
long_wait

6. Everything worked so smooth, UNTIL I shutted down the machine, and then started it up again. Now, the machine shucked on the Raspberry Pi logo, there was a cursor blinking under the logo for 3 times and disappeared. It shucked!!

7. I redid the image and it seemed to work again but once I finished the configurations and unpluged the ac adapter. The next time it always got stuck on that screen.

8. After some research, I found this page. It basically told you to replace the bootcode.bin and start.elf file from here.

9. The problem is, with a PC, it is impossible to access the SD card after loading the image. What I did was, I used a Mac to overwrite the 2 files in the SD card.

10. I tried again and now everything booted up okay and the OS is ready to go. :)

Here are some reference pages

 

Initial Hardware Set up of Raspberry Pi

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Here is the initial hardware I purchased for my Raspberry Pi Project.

RPI

ACAdapter

  • SD Card – Can$9 (on special) from NCIX.com

SDCard

To save cost, I am not planning to buy any monitors, keyboards and mouses. The reason is that at this point I am only interested in building a little server farm and typically people usually only access the servers via remote control tool. I will talk about it later.

The following are also needed but since I did not specifically buy them for this project, I just list them here:

  • LAN cable (Cat 5 cable) – I need to plug one end of this cable into the Raspberry Pi machine.
  • Switch/Router – I need to plug the other end of the LAN cable into this device. So that all Raspberry Pi machines are interconnected.
  • A PC or Mac. – as a client machine to control the Raspberry Pi machine remotely, to set up the OS of the Pi machines. I need to plug the PC or Mac to the same switch/Router as the other Raspberry Pis.
  • USB keyboard, USB mouse, and monitor – we need to use a keyboard, mouse and monitor for the first start up to update configuration.

What is a Raspberry Pi?

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This is the Raspberry Pi Series post 1.

Raspberry Pi is a mini computer, just slighter larger than a credit card. It is small and bare bone but it has enough components to make it a very potential device. It is also very cheap. I paid $35 for the board itself.

RPI_&_CreditCard

It is a perfect tool for digital hobbling. Lots of people are already using it to build multiple interesting projects, including super computer, mini arcade machine, digital photo frame, DIY media player, etc.

For me, I have always been interested in building my own distributed system. i.e. a system that includes multiple computers to work together. However, due to my limited budget and physically space requirement for multiple computers, I was not able to do it,… until now. This small size computer is excellent to build hobby level distributed system.

I have bought 3 Raspberry Pis. Now I will use it to build something interesting and I will use this blog to log what I have done. Hopefully you can get something from my little project :)