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):
For formatting the micro SD card I usually use the gparted utility in Ubuntu. Format the micro SD with FAT 32 filesystem format. You need to have a SD card reader for attaching the SD card to the PC. I use the below SD card and the reader for my purposes:
Once you have attached your SD card with the linux PC you are ready to format it. I am using a Ubuntu PC for my purposes. Go to the console and run the below command:
By default the gparted selects your hard drive (/dev/sda is actually your hard drive, did you know!). Be very cautious, not to play around with your hard drive partitions, you might soon get into a funny situation. So go to the top right corner of the gparted screen and change the drive from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb (if there are no other media attached to the PC). Look at the various field carefully and try to understand what they are. I cannot go into the details of all the fields here. What we are up to is delete everything in the SD card and get it ready for the NOOBS. I can see the below in my SD card (/dev/sdb) at the moment:
You can also see the same partitions with lsblk command on the console, I can see the below:
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2 8:2 0 465.3G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 1 29.7G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 1 2.4G 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 1 1K 0 part
├─sdb5 8:21 1 32M 0 part
├─sdb6 8:22 1 256M 0 part
└─sdb7 8:23 1 27.1G 0 part
As you can see above the SD card has in total 5 partitions /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2, /dev/sdb5, /dev/sdb6, /dev/sdb7. I want to get rid of all of these. So what I do in gparted screen is to select/highlight each partition, right click, and then Unmount. Once the selected/highlighted partition has been Unmounted, you can right click and Delete it. Unmount and Delete each of these partitions in the SD card. Now Click on the green Tick at the top of the gparted screen and Apply. At this point you would have unallocated partition like this:
Right click on the Unallocated partition and click on New. Leave everything as default except Filesystems as FAT32, the default is ext4.
After changing the file systems type it should look like the below:
Click Add. Then again click on the green Tick button at the top, then Apply. Once done, you should see something like the below:
Now, close gparted and go back to your favourite file browser and locate the SD card, in my case it shows something like the below, an empty drive:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
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 (NOOBS_v3_2_1.zip) from the above link. Choose the one you need and move to the next step.
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 be patient! There is a circular progress bar is whirling around at the top on the file browser window, if you have noticed. Once everything copied into the SD card, safely eject the drive and insert it into the SD card slot in Pi.
Now, connect the below to the Pi:
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:
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:
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.
Bringing up Rasberry Pi 3 with NOOBS Getting Rasberry Pi up and running I am using a NOOB version for getting up and running with the Rasberry Pi.
