Dabbling with Raspberry Pi

I was trying to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi since last year but ordering it via Element 14 (ex. Farnell) – Link to buy online – seemed like it would take ages! So last week I went to the IT Show @ Expo and found a small shop selling new Raspberry Pi Model B at S$ 59 !

My Setup

• 1 Raspberry Pi Model B
• 1 Keyboard & Mouse
• 1 60″ Samsung TV with HDMI port
• 1 Samsung Galaxy S2 mobile charger
• 1 LAN wire to connect to the router

Guide to setup the Pi

Official Guide from Raspberry Pi Org!

Some extra comments:

Edit the raspi-config (sudo raspi-config)

1. Enabled expand_rootfs. This helps to use your SD card’s full space (if you are using NOOBS.zip then this option is enabled by Default)
2. Disabled overscan (allows full HDMI display)
3. Set configure_keyboard (Set Timezone to your local timezone, set keyboard layout to Generic 105 US Layout or UK layout  and ensure the encoding is UTF-8)
4. Set change_pass (sets new password for the root user ‘pi’)
5. Enabled ssh
6. Enabled boot_behaviour (in order to boot to startx server or LXDE desktop directly)

Voila! The raspberry pi is now live and running!

So, what to do next?

The first thing I did is run 2 commands to update my libraries and utilities – sudo apt-get install update & sudo apt-get install upgrade

The next thing I did is get my Raspberry Pi online!

1. Created a new directly called “RaspberryPi” and put a index.html file inside it.
2. Then. ran the following command : python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
3. Hurray! Now I have functioning web server and my Pi is online! http://localhost:8080