Raspberry Pi Configuration

Download Raspbian and extract the image somewhere. Next we’ll need to download a program called Etcher to flash the image to the SD card. Install it, insert your SD card and then fire up Etcher. Very easy to use, just select the image and SD card before clicking ‘Flash!’. Depending on the speed of your card this could take a while so you might need to find something else to do while it completes.

Once finished flashing insert the card in the Pi and fire it up. After a bit of patience you’ll eventually be presented with a desktop. From here click the Raspberry Pi menu in the top left corner of the screen and go to Preferences — Raspberry Pi Configuration.

On the System tab you’ll want to change the default password and hostname to something sensible, everything else can stay the same.

Click the Interfaces tab and then enable everything. You can disable SSH if you want as it’s not required but I find it useful at times.

The time will likely be incorrect so click the Localisation tab and set the Locale and Timezone to your location to correct this. Click OK to close the Pi Configuration window and it will ask to reboot. Click yes.

Next connect the Pi to your wireless internet by clicking the Wifi logo on the top right corner and then selecting your network. This will be required for the next step where we’ll update the Raspbian installation. Open a Terminal and enter the following commands, they will take a while so find something else to occupy yourself with while they download everything.

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

That’s it for the Pi configuration so I’ll wrap this up for now, the next post will detail installing Node.js and start working with the Pi hardware. Thanks for reading!