Who ate all the Pi's!Do you have a Raspberry Pi yet? Before you can do anything useful with your Raspberry Pi, you need to make an SD card which contains the boot files and the linux distribution. Assuming you have a 2GB full size SD card or larger, you can create a bootable RPi SD card as follows:
1. Download your RPi image ZIP file - for instance the Debian download at http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi?ICID=hp_raspberry debian6-17-02-2012.img or debian6-19-04-2012.zip.
2. Unpack the ZIP file to get the .img file - this file is a complete binary image of the whole SD card.
3. Use RMPrepUSB and select your SD card - then use the File-->Disk button, select the .img file and then choose 0 - 0 - 0 for the file start, USB sector and USB length (meaning copy all contents of the file to the start of the SD card).
If you wish you can use the Win32DiskImager.exe utility instead of RMPrepUSB which you can download from here and select the win32diskimager-binary.zip. Both are about the same speed, Win32DiskImager is simpler to use and does show the MD5 hash value for the chosen file so that you can check it easily but it does not show much information about the drive letter you have selected (and so may cause you to format the wrong drive!) and has been known to fail to copy the image on occasion. If you have any problems copying the img file to the SD card, try the RMPrepUSB 'CLEAN' button first.
That's it - now go try it! You can also make an image backup of the SD card at any time using RMPrepUSB Disk-->File or the Win32DiskImager - Read button.
The SD card contents of debian6-17-02-2012.img is shown below, notice that we have three partitions:
Also notice that there is no partition marked as Active (bootable). The RPi firmware is coded to look for the file bootcode.bin in the first FAT32 partition - the normal MBR - partition boot process is not followed. The boot sequence for the RPi is:
debian6-17-02-2012.img (obtained by using Drive Info button on RMPrepUSB)
Partition Boot Record
XBOX Media Centre allows you to play music and video. You can also install YouTube and other Add-Ins like 4OnDemand, Demand5, ITV Player or BBCiPlayer - or even watch live UK TV. First download an XBMC image - I used this one (look for the latest version). I used the smaller 'experimental' image for a 4GB SD card which worked fine for me. If you don't have a USB flash drive or a powered USB expansion port, you can transfer files from your Windows PC via the Ethernet and ftp to the Raspberry Pi. Simply load FileZilla on your Windows 7 PC and enter in the IP address of the RPi (see XMBC - System - Information to get it's IP address), then enter in these details: <IP address> pi raspberry 22. Transfer files to the /home/pi folder which should have at least 1Gb of free space. You can then find the files on the XBMC Video/Music - Files - Files - Add Videos/Music - Browse - Root filesystem - home - pi. You can easily install the YouTube add-in by going to Video - Video Add-ons - Get More.. - YouTube - Install. Maybe you want to watch Live UK TV? Just go here and download the zip file and follow the instructions to install TVCatchup 2.0 with Radio Times EPG Here is my h/w setup
I had to change the Audio setting in XBMC - System - to HDMI before I could get any sound. Note: Although the RPi appears to work if powered from one of the two standard USB ports, it actually is very unreliable and the other USB port will not work correctly. The RPi MUST be powered from it's mini-USB power connector. I also advise using a powered USB Hub as plugging and unplugging USB peripherals tends to crash the RPi and you need 3 USB ports anyway to load the plug-ins from a USB flash pen. If you are going to buy a power adaptor, I would recommend you get one that supplies 2A at 5V. The more common 1A 5V chargers are not quite beefy enough. Using this setup, I was able to play 1080p video from 4OnDemand and BBC iPlayer with no problem. iPlayer also allows you to watch some channels (not BBC1 and BBC2) live ('Watch Live'). I have not yet tried a WiFi nano dongle + mini IR keyboard dongle - once this is working, I will have a wireless mini media centre for my TV! Useful bash commandssudo su - stay as su lsusb - list USB devices to find wifi chipset sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales - change from en_GB.UTF-8 to en_US.UTF-8 (or whatever country setting you need).- sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration - change the keyboard to EN UK or USA or whatever. sudo reboot fbset -xres 1024 -yres 768 - change console resolution sudo nano /boot/config.txt - (uncomment and change overscan_left, etc. values to say 64 to get text inside screen width) - use F3 to save and CTRL-X to exit) sudo iwconfig - list wireless devices sudo iwlist wlan0 scanning - scan for access points |
Getting started with the Raspberry Pi (RPi) |
