Hardware Requirements and Notes on Getting Started

I said we’d be going minimal here, and I wasn’t kidding. There aren’t any tricks or hidden costs here. There are no subscription services to pay every month, and no extra hardware is needed; but most of the usual PC hardware accessories, like hard drives, flash drives, fancy mice, keyboards, and Bluetooth devices, can be optionally used, so you don’t have to limit yourself to the basics.

With the introduction of the Raspberry Pi model 4 in June of 2019, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also introduced an official keyboard and mouse for the Pi. These are attractively color-coordinated to match the official Pi case, and the keyboard has a “raspberry button” on it in the usual “system key location,” but otherwise, they are not required. You can use any USB mouse or keyboard, and these can be either wired with USB or they can use Bluetooth for their connections. Other than that, you can use the same keyboard and mouse you had for your old computer.

Any standard monitor will work, but you’ll need a cable with a micro-HDMI plug to connect with your model 4 Pi or a full-size HDMI port to plug into any of the previous models. If you are using the Raspberry Pi model 4, you also have the option of using two monitors at once if you choose. Obviously, you would need two monitors and two micro-HDMI cables to take advantage of the dual-monitor capability.

Creating the Initial Boot Media

Initially, we’ll need to download the operating system software and install it on the SD card. This will require a separate computer running Windows, Mac, or Linux. If you really can’t make that work, there are many places that will sell you a SD card with the software already installed; a simple Google search will find a source in your country.

You will need a micro SD card and adaptor to fit the card into whatever slot your computer has.

There are many distributions, or “brands,” of Linux that are easily available. Two of the most popular are Raspbian and Ubuntu MATE. Both of these focus on different things: Raspbian is the “official” operating system of the Raspberry Pi, and Ubuntu MATE is a much heavier, desktop-oriented operating system. Raspbian is faster and more efficient, while MATE is easier to use and includes more built-in software, but it is also slower.

The current version of Ubuntu MATE as of this writing is 18.04, which was released in April of 2018. That sounds “old,” but Ubuntu has an update system in place where they offer something called LTS, or “Long-Term Support,” edition of their operating system. They guarantee support for an LTS version for up to 4 years. The downside of this is that they only release a new version every 2 years. So there won’t be new LTS edition until April of 2020. Ubuntu does offer upgrades to its regular operating system every 6 months, but they don’t do it for the Raspberry Pi version. So we’re all stuck in 2018 for a while.

Ubuntu MATE can be found at https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/ .

Raspbian, on the other hand, is released on an irregular schedule whenever enough changes accumulate. The latest version as of this writing is called “Buster ” (June of 2019). If you want the cutting edge, most “official” version of the Raspberry Pi operating system, this is the one to use.

I’ll mostly be focusing on Raspbian in this book, but I will occasionally point out something that can be done differently in MATE. One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is that for the cost of a second SD card, you can switch back and forth very quickly. Why not try both?

Raspbian can be found at www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ .

The next piece of software that we’ll need is a special utility to copy the operating system to the SD card and make it bootable. The easiest application I’ve found to do this is balenaEtcher, usually just referred to as Etcher. There is a version available for Windows, Mac, and Linux; so wherever you’re coming from, they make a version for you.

balenaEtcher can be found at www.balena.io/etcher/ .

The process of creating a bootable SD card is simple once you have the preceding ingredients. Download one of the operating system files, either Ubuntu MATE or Raspbian. Whichever you choose, you’ll end up downloading one large file.

Once that’s done, launch Etcher, and it should look like Figure 1-1.

There are three buttons/icons. Click the one on the left, and it will allow you to choose a disk image. This is either the Raspbian or Ubuntu MATE file you just finished downloading.

Insert an SD card into the computer. You may need to use an adaptor, dongle, or hub to make it fit. Once the computer recognizes the card, click the middle icon to select the card. Make absolutely sure not to select the wrong disk, as you can delete your computer’s hard drive if you aren’t careful!

When you’re done selecting the operating system file and the target drive, then click the third icon, “Flash!” This will begin the process of formatting the SD card and copying the operating system onto it. This process may take 5–10 minutes depending on various factors, as in Figure 1-2.

Once the process has completed, Etcher will tell you that it has flashed the card successfully, or it will give you an error message. If there’s an error, follow Etcher’s suggestions and figure out why. Assuming it worked, you can eject the card and proceed to assembling your Pi.

Assembling the Computer

The following lists outline the required and optional assembly parts:

First-Time Raspbian Setup

As mentioned earlier, we’re going to be focusing on the Raspbian distribution from here out. Ubuntu MATE will be very similar, but not exactly the same, as what’s shown here.

Assuming you got past the test pattern and the “raspberries,” you’ll wind up at the Raspbian welcome screen, as seen in Figure 1-3.

Click “Next,” and we’ll get a localization screen that looks a lot like Figure 1-4.

Use the dropdown boxes to select your location as accurately as possible. This is used to set the time and determine what the various keys on your keyboard do. I once had a friend complain that Raspbian didn’t work with any of his keyboards, as the punctuation keys were all wrong. Turned out, he had left the following dialog set to a UK keyboard, and he was in the United States. It’s not all the same!

Now it’s time to change the password for the default user, as shown in Figure 1-5. It might be useful to know if you don’t change it here, the default is user “pi” and that user’s password is “raspberry.” Since this is the same username and password for every default Raspbian install, everywhere, it’s a very good idea to change the password. This user has superuser access and has the ability to delete and change literally anything, so make the password something hard to guess.

We will investigate creating a separate, more personalized user account later. If you are experienced with Linux, the Pi user is a root-level account, so it’s not really a good idea to use this account for everyday work.

The next screen, shown in Figure 1-6, pertains to your monitor and screen resolution. The screens up to this point have been low resolution and pretty plain, since everything is at the lowest resolution possible. If the Raspbian desktop is currently filling your entire screen, then don’t check the box. If there’s a black bar or border on the edges, then click the box, and Raspbian will adjust your settings accordingly. Be aware that you will not see anything happen until the installation is done and the system reboots.

Now, in Figure 1-7, it’s time to set up your Wi-Fi network. If you are going to use Ethernet for your network, you can click “Skip.” Otherwise, find your network here. Note that the Pi model 3B+ has both 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz capabilities available to you, while the regular non-plus model 3B and all the older models can only access 2.4GHz networks. Click the network you want to connect to, and then enter the password for the network on the following screen:

After this, we are essentially done with the installation. The next and final screen, similar to Figure 1-8, will give us the opportunity to download updates and patches to software that didn’t make it into the release on our SD card. You can skip this if you’re in a hurry, but it’s always best to have a fully updated system.

If you choose to let it do the updates, you’ll eventually get a dialog telling you your “System is up to date.” At this point, you’ll need to reboot the system, and everything should be ready to go.

It’s safe at this stage to explore the menus and try out a few apps. Figure 1-9 shows a shot of LibreOffice Writer, the File Manager app, and the Chromium browser, all of which are already installed. Can you find them in the menus?

Hint

The Raspberry icon in the top-left corner is essentially Raspbian’s version of the “Start” button for the menuing system.

Conclusion

This chapter set the stage for the rest of the book. We bought and assembled all the pieces, and then we downloaded and created out boot media. We then went through the setup menus and ended up with a bare-bones but still fully working little computer. Feel free to poke around in the menus and run the apps, and see what it can do. If your needs are simple, such as just web browsing and email, you may already have all you need in a computer. More likely, you’ll need to install a bunch of apps to do the things you want to do with the RPi. If you want to use your Raspberry Pi as a normal desktop computer, then you’re good to go. Still, there are other ways of accessing the computer than just sitting in front of a monitor, as we’ll see in the next chapter.