Prepping a Raspberry Pi

pi.md

Preparing a Pi

My Mac is too old to use the Raspberry Pi Imager.

So intstead I ...

• go to the downloads page and download the "Raspberry Pi OS" version (as opposed to the "Full" or "Lite" versions — just my preference).
• use balenaEtcher to image a Mini SD card. The card should be an "A2" version, and I like to use 64GB.
• use a USB keyboard and HDMI monitor to set up:
  • Wifi network and password (set on first bootup)
  • Username (set on first bootup)
  • SSH connectivity
    • Desktop
    • Pi Icon
    • Preferences
    • Control Centre
    • Interfces
    • SSH - toggle on

More details about how to get things started are nicely written up here.

Note that if doing this without a monitor, these I need to do this, also from that page:

After the image has been written, you will need to make one modification to the image to enable SSH before removing the SD card from your computer.

Assuming you are on a *NIX compatible computer (macOS, Linux, Ubuntu on Windows, etc), open a terminal, navigate to the root of the SD card (/Volumes/boot on macOS) and then type:

touch ssh

Changing local hostname

The default hostname is raspberrypi. I might have a few raspberrypi.local references on my network. To change one, I need to change the hostname.

• On desktop, clicked Rasberry Pi icon
• Picked 'Preferences'
• Picked 'Control Centre'
• Picked 'System'
• Picked 'Change Hostname ...'
• Picked a new hostname

SSH connecting

Using another computer on the same wifi ...

ssh username@hostname.local