So, into the wonderful world of Raspian we go! Now, may aim here is to install everything without getting up from the sofa. i.e. No LAN connection

1. Put the SD card carefully into the Pi.
2. Insert your dongle (oo-er, Mrs) into the Pi, and plug in a keyboard and a monitor. You will not get anywhere unless you can see what the Pi is doing and can type stuff in!
3. Put the power lead in, try not to get motion-sick from the Linux start-up scrawl.
4. When the prompt comes up, use the ‘root’ username. There won’t be a password at the moment.
5. This should give you the shell/command line prompt.
6. Now, you need to mount the SD card, despite it actually being what you’re running off. This is because you want access to the FAT partition where the firmware is.
7. First of all, you want the number one partition on the SD card. I can’t remember what that is at the moment, but it’s the one in /dev/ that begins with mmc and has a ‘1’ in it.
   1. ls /dev – get the name of the mmc device to put into the mmc*** space below.
   2. mkdir /mnt/sd
   3. mount /dev/mmc*** /mnt/sd
   4. mkdir /lib/firmware/zd1211
   5. cp /mnt/sd/zd1211/* /lib/firmware/zd1211/
8. You should now have your firmware in the right place.
9. At the prompt, type ‘reboot’. This will, surprisingly enough, reboot the Pi. Hopefully. If it fails to come back up, pull the power, wait a few seconds and re-insert.
10. When the Pi comes back up, your firmware should have loaded and your dongle should now be active.
11. Fortunately, the library necessary for connecting to my WPA-secured router is included in this distribution. If it wasn’t, I’d have to plug it into the LAN and do:
    1. apt-get install wpa-supplicant
12. But it is, so I don’t have to.
13. You now need to know the ID of your router (the SSID to be more exact) and the connection password.
14. Now, you will need to edit the file /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
    1. I use vi, you don’t have to. I’m going to assume you’re using ‘nano’ which is easier to use.
    2. nano /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
    3. This will create a new file.
    4. Add the following to the file:
       network={
       ssid=”your router SSID”
       psk=”your router connection password”
       }
    5. Save the file & exit.
15. Type the following at the prompt:
    1. wpa_supplicant -B -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dwext &
    2. (The & means it is a background process – if you don’t do this, you end up stuck in the command).
    3. Once it comes up with text that makes it sound like you’ve successfully connected, type:
    4. dhclient wlan0
    5. (This gets your IP address)
16. Type ‘ifconfig -a’ at the prompt. The bottom one should be your wifi adapter and you should be able to see an ip address. If you don’t, well, you probably got the ssid/password wrong in the conf file.
17. You should now be on the Internet.

Update the operating system and get a decent WiFi interface

1. At the prompt, type:
2. apt-get update
3. This will update the package database so you can update your operating system.
4. Once that’s done, do:
5. apt-get upgrade
6. This will upgrade any module that needs it. It will take some time.
7. Once that’s done, do:
8. apt-get install wicd-curses
9. Say yes to it using up the space on the disk. Thanks to the steps with gparted you will have lots of space to play with.
10. wicd-curses is an interface to wireless networking that you can use to see what other WiFi networks there are in the area and gives you a handy interface to enter passwords, automatically connect etc.
11. Do another ‘reboot’ and when the Pi comes back up, login as root again and do:
12. shutdown -h 0
13. This will shut down your Pi. Wait until it says “System Halted” and then pull the power. (It may just switch off by itself, but once you see that message, it’s safe to pull the plug.

Next time…

We will add the wpa_supplicant commands to rc.local to automatically start-up when we boot. And we will look at getting the Bluetooth keyboard/mouse all working nicely!