Setting up a new Raspberry Pi 2B

Setting up a new Raspberry Pi 2B

This is for headless configuration using the command line via SSH

1. Load standard Raspbian Jessie image onto an SD card.

   • Download from here: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/]
   • On Mac, use dd to load the image to the card

2. Connect the RPi into a local router and connect your PC to that router

• SSH into the RPi using ssh pi@raspberrypi (the default hostname for a new Rasbian install is raspberry) you may also want to try raspberrypi.local if it doesn't connect

• Run sudo raspi-config to:

  • Expand the file system
  • Setup the timezone
  • Change the hostname to something unique
  • Enable the camera (if you have one)
  • Change username and password
  • Force the audio to go through the headphone jack or HDMI

• Reboot to have the changes take effect

• Sign in with your new hostname, i.e. ssh pi@newhostname

• Run sudo apt-get update to update Raspbian packages

• Run sudo apt-get upgrade to upgrade the packages

With all of these steps, you should have a ready to go, updated, new RPi with your own hostname that you can connect to via Ethernet.

You can reboot your Pi using sudo reboot.

IMPORTANT: SHUT DOWN PI CORRECTLY TO AVOID CORRUPTING FILE SYSTEM When you want to shut your Pi down, use sudo halt.

Alternate way to setup a new Pi - Adafruit PiFinder + Occidentalis

Use Adafruit's great Occidentalis package and their awesome PiFinder to setup.

With your Pi connected to an ethernet and with a fresh base image, use the PiFinder software to find the Pi. Then, bootstrap your pi by giving it a unique hostname, and setting up the WiFi settings. This also has the benefit of installing node.js for us so we will be ready to go without needing to install node on it's own.

Run the bootstrap and you should be good to go after a reboot.

More instructions here:

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Pi-Finder#adafruit-raspberry-pi-finder

Troubleshooting note:

We have found that sometimes the WiFi does not come up after you change the wifi settings with occidentalis.txt. If you boot up and then plug in the wifi, or unplug and plug in the wifi adapter after the system is booted it seems to come back online.

(We think that something is happening in startup where the wifi adapter does not get initialized on startup after we change wifi settings)

Setting up US keyboard layout

If you find that your keys don't produce the symbol you are looking for ($ - %, # - £) that's probably because your keyboard layout is set to UK and your keyboard has a US layout. To change this,

• run sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard
• replace XKBLAYOUT="gb" with XKBLAYOUT="us"
• reboot the Pi using sudo reboot