Setting up Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi

1. Insert the microSD card into the microSD card slot of Pi. RPi 1 Model A and RPi 1 Model B do not have slots for an SD card. So, for these board models, we must use a microSD to SD card converter.
2. Connect the Pi to the HDMI monitor. As discussed earlier, in case you have a VGA monitor, connect it using the HDMI/mini-HDMI/micro-HDMI to VGA converter.
3. Connect the USB mouse and USB keyboard. It is recommended that you have a single keyboard with a mousepad. For RPi Zero and RPi Zero W, you need to first connect it to a USB OTG cable, and then connect the USB OTG cable to the board.
4. Connect the RPi board to an appropriate power supply. Connect the monitor to the power supply. We need to make sure that the power is switched off at this point.
5. Ensure you verify all the connections once. Then, turn on the power supply of the monitor. Finally, turn on the power supply for the RPi.

Now, our RPi board will start booting up. The green LED on the board will start blinking. Congratulations! The RPi board is booting for the first time.

Note

If your HDMI monitor is showing no signal, then power down the RPi and change #hdmi_force_hotplug=1 to hdmi_force_hotplug=1 in /boot/config.txt on the microSD card. Boot up the RPi with this changed setting and the HDMI monitor will show the signal.

Once the RPi boots up, the Raspbian desktop and a guided setup window appear, as follows:

Figure 1.31 – Welcome window on Raspbian

Click on the Next button, and the following window will appear:

Figure 1.32 – Window for setting the country

In the preceding window, set Country: and Language:. It will automatically select the time zone according to the country you selected. You can change that too if you wish. Click on the Next button, and the following window will appear:

Figure 1.33 – Window for setting a new password

You can choose to set a new password for the default pi user. If you leave it blank, then it will retain the default password. The following is the next window that appears:

Figure 1.34 – Window for setting up the screen

Check the checkbox if there are black borders on the edges of the desktop view. The Raspbian OS will rectify it upon the next boot. The following window will appear after you click on the Next button, but only if the board model has Wi-Fi:

Figure 1.35 – Wi-Fi connections

Choose the network that you know the credentials for, and click on the Next button. The following window will appear:

Figure 1.36 – Connecting to the Wi-Fi at my home

Key in your Wi-Fi password here, and click on the Next button. The following window will appear:

Figure 1.37 – Update Software

We can update the Raspbian OS and installed software here. We are going to learn how to do it manually in the latter part of this chapter. Click on the Skip or Next button, and the following window will appear:

Figure 1.38 – Confirmation of completing the initial setup

We have finished most of the setup. Now, there are a few more things to do before we reboot out RPi, so click on the Later button.

Now, in the top-left corner of the desktop, you should see a Raspberry icon. It is the menu for Raspbian and functions in a similar way to the Windows logo on Microsoft Windows. Click on the logo and navigate to Preferences | Raspberry Pi Configuration:

Figure 1.39 – Raspberry Pi Configuration in the Raspbian menu

This is the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool. It will open a window as follows, and we can change the settings of the Raspberry Pi board:

Figure 1.40 – Configuring the system

The preceding screenshot is the System tab. As of now, there is no need to change anything here. The following is the Interfaces tab:

Figure 1.41 – Configuring interfaces

Enable the camera, SSH, and VNC. The following is the Performance tab:

Figure 1.42 – Memory and Overclock options

This menu has an option for overclocking and GPU memory. For the RPi 4B, overclocking is disabled. We will learn how to overclock an RPi 4B board manually in the next chapter. The Localisation tab is as follows:

Figure 1.43 – Localisation options

You might want to change these settings as per your region of residence.

Once all these settings have been changed as per our choice, we can restart the RPi board by clicking on the Shutdown button in the Raspbian menu:

Figure 1.44 – Rebooting the Pi

Here, we find the option to reboot the RPi. Once we reboot, and if we have chosen to retain the original password for the default user, pi, the following warning message window will appear when booting up:

Figure 1.45 – Message after rebooting if the default password has not been changed

And this will keep on appearing after every boot as long as we choose to retain the default password.

Connecting various RPi board models to the internet

We can directly plug in the Ethernet cable to the RJ45 Ethernet port Pi boards. This will automatically detect the connection and connect to the internet.

Note

Make sure that DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is enabled at the Wi-Fi router, the managed switch, or the internet gateway.

PRi 1 A, PRi 1 A+, RPi Zero, RPi Zero W, and RPi 3 A+ do not have Ethernet ports. However, RPi Zero W and RPi 3 A+ have built-in Wi-Fi. We can use a USB Wi-Fi dongle for the remaining models:

Figure 1.46 – USB Wi-Fi adapter

Plug this Wi-Fi adapter into the USB port. If the USB ports are not enough, then use a powered USB hub. For Raspberry Pi Zero, we need to use an additional USB OTG cable, as discussed earlier.

After plugging in the USB Wi-Fi adapter, we need to open lxterminal. This is the command-line utility. We can find it as a small black icon in Raspbian's taskbar and under Accessories in the Raspbian menu. Once we click on it, the following window will appear:

Figure 1.47 – Raspberry Pi LXterminal window

We can type in the Linux commands here. After typing them in, press Enter to execute the command. We have opened this so that we can manually configure the network interface of Raspbian. It is quite easy. All the network-related information is stored in the /etc/network/interfaces file. To connect to the Wi-Fi after plugging in the USB Wi-Fi dongle, we need to add a few entries to this file. First, take the backup of the original file by executing the following command:

mv /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.bkp

Then, we can create the interfaces file from scratch by running the following command:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

The preceding command will open the network interface's file with a plain text editor known as nano. It is a simple WYSIWYG editor. Enter the following lines there:

source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "AshwinIon"
wpa-psk "internet1"

After entering the lines, press Ctrl + X and then press Y. In the preceding settings, substitute AshwinIon with your own SSID and internet1 with a password for the same. Then, run the following command in Command Prompt:

sudo service networking restart

This restarts the networking service and connects to the Wi-Fi. In any case (Ethernet or Wi-Fi), the RPi is assigned with a unique IP address. We can find it out by running the ifconfig command at lxterminal. The output of the command will have the Ipv4 address listed under inet.

Another way to know the IP address of the RPi is to check the active client tables in the router or the managed switch that the RPi board is connected to. The following is a screenshot of my router's active client table where we can see an entry for RPi:

Figure 1.48 – Active client table of a home Wi-Fi router