The first month or so I owned the Raspberry Pi I had an awful time getting the thing to boot consistently. I would mess with it for a few days then give up for a week.   I thought I was dealing with a power supply issue or something was wrong with my images. Then I happened to notice a mention in the troubleshooting SD cards section of the Raspberry Pi wiki. Turns out that you can’t use a mini SD card and a SD card adapter. The Raspberry Pi won’t read the boot sector consistently.

Now that I have the Pi booting normally I had started putting together a whole section on all the preliminary stuff you need to get done to get the Pi to be useful. Well the good folks at the Raspberry Pi foundation have made a new flavor of Linux Debian for the Pi called Raspbian. This spanking new image starts off by walking you through all the fun little initial configuration stuff. As a consequence it invalidates a bunch of the first start stuff on the wiki. At least it saves me writing up a long how to.

So instead here are some basic Linux line commands for those that don’t know Linux:

sudo – run a command as administrator. Most commands that change the configuration of the Pi will require this preceding it. One of the weird things with Linux example: sudo make me a sandwich (sorry couldn’t resist) Real example:  sudo hostname

cd – change directory example: cd ect

md – make directory example: md myExtraSpecialDirectory

Sudo ip addr show – get the Pi’s ip address

sudo hostname – get the Pi’s hostname

sudo apt-get install – install program

Remotely controlling your Pi –

To remotely control your Pi you are going to need a VNC program. There are quite a few of them, but the only one I found that let you control the same desktop that your Pi outputs from its RCA or HDMI port (desktop 0) and thats X11VNC. I like being able to control desktop 0 because it lets me manipulate the pi and go back to doing something else while it downloads or whatever and the whole time I can keep an eye with it on the monitor.  If you are going to run your Pi headless (that is without keyboard, mouse or monitor) you don’t particularly need X11VNC. Since I find it so handy its the one I use. Here is the command you need to install X11VNC:

sudo apt-get install x11vnc

Next you will need to set up X11VNC so that it will autostart with the GUI. Here’s the steps:

create autostart entry

– cd .config
– mkdir autostart
– cd autostart
– nano x11vnc.desktop
– paste following text:

[Desktop Entry]-Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=X11VNC
Comment=
Exec=x11vnc
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Hidden=false

– save and exit (Ctrl-X, Y, <Enter>)

One more thing to note.  You will probably want to manually set your Pi’s domain name. Now I couldn’t find any instructions for how to do this with Raspbian, but a little poking around and I found a file that contains the hostname. There is a file located on your Pi at /ect/dhcp/hostname.  It contains one thing, the hostname for your pi. Here are the commands if you need them:

cd /ect/dhcp/

sudo nano hostname

Then change the text in the file from “RasperryPi” to what ever you want to name your Pi.

That’s all the config I have for my Pi so far.  More updates when there is more.