Getting Rasberry Pi up and running

I am using a NOOB version for getting up and running with the Rasberry Pi. The version of my Raspberry Pi is 3 Model B (see below):

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Format a micro SD card

You will possibly need to format a SD Card (if you are not lucky and have one already formatted properly for NOOBS). To format an SD Card I usually prefer gparted. I will format my SD card in FAT32 format for NOOBS. I prefer gparted for formatting media cards. You may follow the instructions in the below tutorial to use gparted if you like:

How to format SD card using gparted.

Get hold of NOOBS

To download an official distribution of NOOBS, go to the below link:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

noobs

Click on the Download ZIP and you will get the latest vesion of the NOOBS. Or if you need a different NOOBS version other than the latest, you can get a copy of that in the below link:

http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/NOOBS/images/

For my purposes I have download the NOOBS_v3_2_1 version (hence, I go a NOOBS_v3_2_1.zip file in my ~/Download/ folder) from the above link. Choose the one you want and locate the zip file in your local machine.

Update:

I recently accessed the NOOB’s download page and I found the download page is not always sorted in order. So to see the latest version of NOOB I click on the Last Update link couple of time till I see the latest release dates and version at the top of the page. An example screenshot can be like this:

NOOBN download page

Extract the zip file

Once you have downloaded the NOOB version you want, extract the NOOBS and you should have a folder called something like NOOBS_*_*. In my case it is NOOBS_v3_2_1. Go inside the folder using your file browser, select and copy everything (Ctrl-A, Ctr-C). Go back to the SD card and do a Ctrl-V. This will copy and paste everything that the NOOBS_v3_2_1 had into the SD card.

Be patient, it takes a while to copy the stuffs across into the SD card. I often make mistake of prematurely eject the drive and nothing works. So please be patient! There is a circular progress bar at the top on the file browser window which shows the progress of the copy (see the picture below), if you have not already noticed.

Once everything copied into the SD card, safely eject the drive and insert it into the SD card slot in Pi.

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Now, connect the below to the Pi:

  1. A keyboard.
  2. A monitor/TV
  3. A mouse (very useful)
  4. Connect the Pi using micro USB cable to the PC to power it up.

Once you have powered the Pi, the NOOBS will take care of booting the device and soon you should see something like this on the Monitor:

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Select the Raspberry Pi Full option from the menu shown above. You will require at least ~8GB I guess. Other option is to select the LibreELEC_RPi2 which I won’t recommend at this point. After you select one option from the menu, the “install” button will get activated. Click on Install. See the below pictures for reference:

Once you have clicked on the Install the installation starts:

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Wait for the installation to finish. After the installation the setup wizard comes up, follow the screens and setup the Country, Language and Timezone etc. Keep the default user account ‘pi‘ and password ‘raspberry‘. It may ask for restart, do restart.

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