Installing and Configuring Raspbian for Raspberry Pi

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This is a simple guide on installing and configuring Raspbian for Raspberry Pi. Although Noobs is recommended for beginner, we find that downloading and transferring the image to SD card is much faster.

Installing Raspbian

First download the latest version of Raspbian from Raspberry Pi website. To transfer the image to SD card, we need to unzip the file first. We also need to prepare a SD card with an adapter for card reader or USB drive.

Next we install and launch Etcher. This a free and open source tool to make bootable drive from Debian/Ubuntu based Linux. Select the image and drive and begin the transfer.


Once it is done, insert the SD card into Pi and boot the system. During first boot we have addition configuration such as setting password etc. Once the setup is completed, please run update as follows:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Once the update is complete we are good to go. 

Configuring Raspbian

Raspbian is similar to other Linux distribution. In addition we can configure essential service such as ssh server and vnc server using the Raspberry Pi Configuration app. The app is located at Preference > Raspberry Pi Configuration as shown below:


Once the GUI interface is launch, select Interface.  We can enable camera, ssh or vnc.


Raspberry Pi has RealVNC installed, once we enabled VNC and we are good to go. For further configuration please refer to our post under server configuration. 

There are times that we need to reset Pi password or we need to perform audio configuration. We can perform that by launching from command line:

sudo raspi-config


A text based configuration box will appear as follows:


Forget Pi Password or Pi Password Not Accepted

To reset password select the first option, and you will be prompt to set a new password.

Reclaim Empty Space in SD Card

Raspbian image only uses lesss than 2GB of data. We can expand the os so that it could reclaim and use the remaining empty space in the SD card. To do that under Advanced Options, select the first option: Expand Filesystem.


Set Raspberry Pi Audio

If you have HDMI attached to the monitor, the audio will pass through HDMI by default. However, we can direct the audio to head phone jack user Advance Options > A4: Audio.

For configuration that are specific to Raspberry Pi, it is either in the GUI interface or the command line raspi-config.

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