Raspberry Pi – Booting to a new 64GB SD Card

We left off from the previous Raspberry Pi video having downloaded the Raspbian image from the latest downloads and images this to a new class 10 64GB SD card. the class 10 cards are quick and give great access times in Pi. ( Class 10 SD cards equate to 10 MBs, Class 6 , 6MBs , etc). Now we look at adding in the card to a Type B, 512MB Pi board and seeing how we set the OS up on first boot. With the machine through its first boot and rebooting to effect the change we will connect via SSH, Secure Shell so we see a better view of what is happening.

Connect the device

A good start is to add the SD card to the Raspberry, I am using it on wired Ethernet and I plug in the keyboard to the USB and video to the HDMI port. With everything in place I add the power. You will need a 700mA or higher power supply. I use on iPhone charger which has 1A output. This connect to the micro-USB port on the Raspberry.

raspi-config

On first boot raspi-config will run. this allows me as the name suggests to be able to configure the Raspberry. It will run at first boot but we can invoke it later with sudo raspi-config.

The first menu item will allow us to expand the root file system. Certainly if we have added in a larger SD card we will most likely want to do this use the whole space. This we do in the video and scripts will run to expand the EXT4 file-system. I my system this give me 55GB free space on the root fs.

We can change the password for the default user. The use is pi and the password raspberry .

I move to the advanced section to enable the SSH server. this will allow me remote access to the Pi from Windows using PuTTY a free download or from Linux using the SSH client. the following screenshot shows the PuTTY client in Windows connect to the Raspberry Pi.

Reboot

On reboot we can connect to the SSH server. During the reboot we can see the benefits od the faster card. The boot process is quick. In addition we should not that it is quiet, there are no fans or disks spinning up. The Pi is great where you need the device on all the time. If we still have the monitor connected to the Pi the IP Address will show even before login. We can then connect from your own machine via SSH. We show in the video how this is pretty standard Linux and we can use the Raspberry to learn:

• Linux
• Java
• BASH
• Python
• Perl

As well as using it for your home automation or robotics projects. There are 101 fun things that we can do and we will use the Raspberry in some upcoming Java tutorials that I host on my site.

We see in the following screenshot that java 7 SE is installed and ready top go on Raspbian.