Now we can prepare the Raspberry Pi to start up for the first time. Place it securely on a desk or in a case. Make sure it is not in danger of falling on the floor, and do not rest it on top of the bag inside which it comes. We can start up the Rasberry Pi by performing the following steps:
Plug the SD card, screen, keyboard, and mouse into the Raspberry Pi. Also plug in the Internet cable if you have one, as shown in the following figure:
Plug the power cable into the Raspberry Pi. The red power light should come on, and the green Activity light should flash occasionally.
If necessary, adjust the screen settings to display the images from the Raspberry Pi's input.
You should see a selection of operating systems for you to install (refer to the following screenshot), each with a short description. This book relies on you having Raspbian installed, so select Raspbian and click on Install. You can always come back and select a different operating system later; I will explain how you can do this in the next section.
Wait. Operating systems are quite large, so the installation will take a few minutes. You can sit back and read some of the tips shown to you or read the next few steps in this book.
When the installation has completed, you should see a blue screen with a final list of options (shown in the following screenshot). This is the Raspberry Pi Software Configuration Tool. Most things should be set up the way we want them, but there are two useful settings to be changed. Select Enable Boot to Desktop/Scratch using the arrow keys and press Enter. Select the Desktop Log in option, and press Enter. You should now be back at the main menu. Next, select Internationalisation Options and choose your preferred language and keyboard layout. Use the right arrow key to move to Finish and press Enter. You can return to this menu any time by typing
sudo raspi-configas a command line (refer to the next section for details).
After a minute or so, the Raspberry Pi should finish rebooting, and you should see the Raspberry Pi desktop (shown in the following screenshot). This may be familiar to you. You can double-click on the icons to start programs, or select from a menu. We will mainly be using Scratch and Python in this book, but take a minute to explore what's available to you. In particular, there are several Python Games. These are the sorts of things that are possible after a little programming practice.
