I recently bought a Raspberry Pi 3 manufactured by Element14. The first thing to do in order to use it is to install an Operating System. There are lots of OS available for the Raspberry Pi such as Raspbian, Windows 10 IoT Core and RISC OS but for first time setup we are going to proceed with Raspbian which is officially supported by Raspberry Pi foundation and available for download on their website. For installing it we need the following:-
- microSD card (Class 10 recommended).
- USB SD card reader or an embedded card reader on your laptop/desktop.
Windows Walkthrough
Download Raspbian from this link and extract the image.
For burning the image on Windows 10, we will need to format the SD card first if it is not already empty. It is recommended to use SD Formatter 4.0 by SD Association, download and install it.
Select your drive correctly and then click on ‘Option’ and set ‘FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT’ to ‘ON’ and finally click on ‘Format’.
To burn the image download and install Win32 Disk Imager.
Click on the small folder icon and select the image then choose the correct drive in ‘Device’ and finally click finish.
Ubuntu Walkthrough
To format the SD card in Ubuntu, we will use GParted. To download GParted, open the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and type sudo apt-get install gparted and press ‘Enter’. Enter ‘y’ when prompted to install. Start GParted and select the SD Card on the top right corner (make sure you choose the correct one or you might lose data).
Right click on the partitions, in this case sdc1 and sdc2 and click delete. Then right click on ‘unallocated’ and click ‘New’ and enter the settings shown in the image below (New size will vary depending on the size of your SD card).
Click on ‘Add’ then click on the green tick at the top and the SD card will be formatted.
Download Raspbian from this site and extract it to a folder such as your desktop.
Remove your SD card and type df -h in the terminal to show storage devices/folders on the computer. Reconnect your SD Card and retype df -h and see what has been added. In my case ‘dev/sdc1’ as shown in the image.
Next, unmount the SD Card partition by typing umount /dev/sdc1, replace ‘sdc1’ with the name shown on your terminal.
Find the path to the Raspbian image which we extracted to the desktop before, mine is in a found in a folder named ‘Raspbian’ on the desktop ‘/home/yashtir/Desktop/Raspbian/2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img’ and write this line in the terminal.
sudo dd bs=4M if =/home/yashtir/Desktop/Raspbian/2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.img of /dev/sdc
Remember to replace the path of the image file and SD Card (without the partition number) to yours. You won’t see anything happening after pressing enter, it will appear as it is freeze. It took 5 minutes to burn the image on my PC, then type sync to delete the write cache.
Note: The SD Card will be partitioned after installing Raspbian and it might appear to smaller in size.
Plug in the microSD card in the Raspberry Pi and switch it on.
Next time we will run the Raspberry Pi remotely.