Installing Raspbian onto a Raspberry Pi

Here I suggest some recommended steps to install Raspbian on top of their install guide.

Choosing an OS for the Raspberry Pi

One of the main ways to install a Raspberry Pi OS is to download a disk image called NOOBS. This lets you choose to easily install a number of different OS’s. If you want to try a variety of OS’s or are unsure of what you want to install I recommend this. You can follow the guide below to burn this image to a memory stick.

I decided to install Raspbian Jessie with PIXEL instead of NOOBS. This is because I wanted a fully featured Debian derivative (which is what Raspbian is) installed.

Burning the Image to a SD Card

Now we need to burn the image to the SD card, this is going to explain what you need to do if you are using windows. If you are using Linux/Mac OS I assume you know what you are doing. If you are using windows you first need to unzip the OS image so you have the the .img file available.

Once you have downloaded and unzipped the image you need to burn it, you can do this with win32 Disk Imager. Selecting the image and SD drive and pressing write will burn the OS to the SD card.

Now you can put the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and turn it on.

After Installing Raspbian

When you have installed Raspbian you will want to perform a few bits of basic maintenance.

Changing the user password

The default username for the pi is pi and the default password is raspberry . This can be used to login to your pi but it is recommended that this is changed immediately. You can change the password of the current user by entering

passwd

Changing the hostname

Since I am planning to run multiple Raspberry Pi’s I need to change the hostname. The default hostname is raspberrypi which you can use to connect to it via ssh. However to change this you can modify the /etc/hosts file on the Raspberry Pi.  You can modify this by running the following command.

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Updating the Pi

The Raspbian images are created every now and then so are not going to be fully up to date. You can update the pi by running the following two commands

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Running these commands you will update the catalogue of packages and then upgrade any of them which are outdated.

Final words

These are some basic steps to install and set up a Raspberry Pi Raspbian install. As I find more steps that I want to perform each time I install Raspbian I will update this blogpost. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments.