The Raspberry Pi is a very low-cost, very small computer capable of running Linux that also provides GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output). As such, it’s something of a hacker’s dream and there’s been a ton of buzz around it. I ordered two a couple of months ago and just got them in. Here’s what you need to get started.
First off, you’ll need a power supply that supplies at least 1A reliably. They say it’ll run on less, but I tried with an older supply and the ethernet kept cutting out. I ended up using this USB adapter with a USB micro cable. For storage you’ll need an SD card that’s at least Class 6 (I used this one and it’s working great so far). Other cards can work well too, check their Verified Peripherals wiki.
Next, you need to get an operating system on your SD card. I’m using the suggested Debian Squeeze package via a very easy and convenient python script called RaspPiWrite (OSX and Unix only as of writing). Follow the instructions there and you’ll have a R-Pi-ready OS in about half an hour or less.
Stick your SD card in your Pi, attach a monitor & keyboard (I used an old CRT TV that was nearby since the R-Pi only has HDMI or component video out), and plug the power in, and you’ll see the glorious spew of a linux boot sequence! Your login is pi / raspberry.
Since I don’t want to keep my Pi connected to a keyboard and monitor, I need to be able to SSH into it. They made this easy. Just connect some ethernet and do:
sudo mv /boot/boot_enable_ssh.rc /boot/boot.rc
Then reboot (
sudo reboot
) and towards the end of the boot sequence, when it starts SSHd, it should tell you the R-Pi’s IP address. At any other time you can do
ip addr
or even
ip addr | grep -e 'inet .* eth0'
.
Let me know if this worked for you, and happy hacking! This is only the tip of the iceberg, so look forward to more Raspberry Pi tutorials!
