This book is an introduction to the revolutionary Raspberry Pi computer and its official operating system, Raspbian. Raspbian is a free, open source operating system based on the extremely popular Debian Linux distribution. Raspbian has been specifically customized for maximum performance on the Raspberry Pi.
After reading this book, you will be able to do the following:
Set up and configure a Raspberry Pi from scratch
Install and configure the Raspbian operating system
Customize the desktop environment to suit your requirements and taste
Install and manage software packages on your Raspberry Pi
You can get a good understanding of the capabilities of your Raspberry Pi and Raspbian by taking a look at some of the other projects that are based on Raspbian.
Chapter 1, The Raspberry Pi and Raspbian, runs you through the history of the Raspberry Pi and the different hardware and software components that make up the Raspberry Pi.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with Raspbian, walks you through how to set up your Raspberry Pi and how to load Raspbian onto your SD card.
Chapter 3, Starting Raspbian, walks you through the initial setup of Raspbian and the Linux boot process.
Chapter 4, An Introduction to the Raspbian Desktop, details the Raspbian desktop and runs you through the preinstalled software that is included with Raspbian.
Chapter 5, Installing Software on Raspbian, teaches you how to install software on your Raspberry Pi using the different methods explained in this chapter.
Chapter 6, The Console, takes you through the basic use of the bash console in Raspbian.
Chapter 7, Other Linux Distributions Based on Raspbian, looks at several other exciting projects that are based on Raspbian.
Appendix, References, lists a collection of links to the resources used in this book and other interesting information.
You will need the following in order to work with the examples in this book:
A Raspberry Pi
A 4 GB or bigger SD card
A USB keyboard and mouse
A monitor (preferably with HDMI)
An HDMI cable
A micro USB phone charger as a power supply
All of these are available from element14. Don't forget to grab a cup of coffee!
This book is written for beginners who wish to learn how to make the most out of their Raspberry Pi and learn more about Raspbian, the official Linux operating system for the Raspberry Pi.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "It is a software tool that actually installs a software package from a .deb file."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo apt-get install apache2
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Simply select Mark and then click on Apply."
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