Rasppi-canakit

Assuming you have purchased a " CanaKit Raspberry Pi Complete Starter Kit ", here's what you need to do to get going initially:


 * ethernet cable connected to a DHCP capable network
 * HDMI cable to HDMI capable monitor
 * Keyboard with USB connector
 * plug the provided SD card into the SD slot

Now plug the power cable into the RPi and watch the system come up. At some point, you should see the following appear on the HDMI monitor:

using either the "Tab" key, position the cursor on the menu item you want to invoke and hit the "enter" key. Then tab to "&lt;Select&gt;" and hit the enter key to invoke the selected configuration script. When you are finished, tab to "&lt;Finish&gt;" and hit the enter key.

DO NOT perform the "expand_rootfs"! (I promise I'll explain why and offer an alternative). Here is some information related to some of the menu items:


 * change_pass: the default user name is "pi" and the default password is "raspberry". I've changed this to password to " xxxxxxxxxxxx " on the RPi boxes I've provided.
 * change_timezone: set this to whatever timezone is reasonable for the deployment
 * ssh: choose the "Enable" option, which permits you to remotely connect to the RPi and removes the need to have both the keyboard and the HDMI cable connected to the RPi
 * update: this will pull down updates to the Raspberry configuration program, which may also be run from the command line by entering "raspi-config" and is found at "/usr/bin/raspi-config".

After all of this is done, reboot the RPi. Now you can expand the root fille system without introducing the backup/restore challenges I discovered after using the raspi-config "expand_rootfs". This web site is worth reading: rpi-wiggle.

Here is what I did:


 * 1) download the rpi-wiggle script (wget https://raw.github.com/dweeber/rpiwiggle/master/rpi-wiggle)
 * 2) sudo chmod a+x rpi-wiggle
 * 3) sudo ./rpi-wiggle

This will permit you to expand the root file system to take advantage of "most" of the space on the SDCard, leaving enough space for backup/restore to work when using the same size SDCard (which matters when you're "cloning" a RPi system using the same size SDCard.