Setting Up
If you buy a kit, there’s a good chance the microSD card that comes with it will contain NOOBS—that’s New Out Of Box Software, by the way, not an insult from
Counter-Strike. Pop the card into the Pi and switch it on—the software talks you through the process of installing an OS, most likely the official Raspberry Pi OS if you’re just starting out. Alternately, if you’ve got a PC handy, you can use the Raspberry Pi Imager app ( www.raspberrypi.org/software) to download and install one manually.
You can use any size of microSD (we’ve never found the need to go particularly large; 32GB cards are common), but it must be formatted as FAT32, which the Imager can do for you, as Windows 10 probably won’t. OS images are downloaded from within the app, and there are several available. Alternatives to the official OS tend to be aimed at specific uses, or advanced users, but Ubuntu is available as a full 64-bit OS that can use all that lovely 8GB of RAM (if you’ve bought that model).
There are a few versions of the Raspberry Pi OS. There’s the recommended version, which is the GUI but very few apps beyond a browser. Then there’s the Lite version, which doesn’t even have the GUI and is for those who know the Linux command-line interface or feel like taking a crash course. Then there’s the Full version, which bundles the GUI with recommended software. Unless setting up a Pi for a specific purpose, we tend to go for the Full version—storage is cheap.
After it boots (watch the red and green LEDs flicker), the setup process goes through things like choosing your location and language, and connecting to Wi-Fi. You’re asked if your display is overscanning, and the system reboots—it’s an efficient and quick process. Note that while there’s password security on the Pi, it’s often set to automatically log you in—you can change this if you want.
Raspberry Pi OS doesn’t take particularly long to boot, even from a microSD card, so you’ll soon be back to the desktop, wondering what to do. The very first thing is to run some system updates, for which you need to open Terminal. Most Pi administration still takes place in the text-based world of the Terminal window. While there is a GUI version of the Raspberry Pi Config app, for example, we find the Terminal version to be better.
To run the updates, type “sudo apt update” and let it do its thing. Once it’s finished, and you’re returned to the Terminal prompt, type “sudo apt full-upgrade” and type “y” when you are prompted. There may be a fair bit of downloading involved, depending on how out of date the OS image you installed is. While we wait, let’s unpack what we just typed. Your standard user account doesn’t have administrator privileges, so the “sudo” part gives you the privileges to change files you don’t own. It means “superuser do.” Then, “apt” is the name of the Linux Advanced Packaging Tool, which handles the software installation and updating. “Update” and “upgrade” are commands for apt, with “full-upgrade” used here as it picks up changes in more things.
We can see apt in action again by installing Firefox. Open the Terminal window and type “sudo apt install firefox-esr”; Linux can install software from online stores called repositories, and the Pi pulls its software from the Raspbian Repository unless you tell it not to. So, in this line of text, we have the sudo privilege escalator, a call for apt to install something, and the name of the app we want to install—change this to GIMP or Scribus or LibreOffice to get the app you want. Firefox ESR is the Extended Support Release version of Firefox—it may miss a few of the latest features but is up to date security-wise.
There is also a Recommended Software app on the Raspberry Menu, which provides a GUI way to install a limited range of programs.