The intent of this guide to get you up and running with your Raspberry Pi (RasPi from here on), fresh out of the box to Operating System (OS) loaded, booted, software updates installed, SSH installed/configured and maybe a few relevant packages to make our first project easier. We will also walk through how to get some information about your RasPi that will help to remotely SSH into it when your Pi and laptop are on a network and you don’t know your IP addresses (like the PrimeSo network that serves DHCP).

Identify the version of Raspberry Pi that you have (A, B, B+, 2, etc…)

Download your choice of Operating System to install (recommend Raspbian to start). You can find a variety of offerings (including Raspbian) at http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

But, there are lot’s of other OS installs available as well (like Kali Linux at and, soon, Windows 10 for the RasPi 2).

Unzip / Untar / Uncompress the downloaded file, which shouldresult in an .iso or .img file.

Insert the SD (or microSD) card into your computer (not the RasPi) and reformat to MS-FAT32 and set a name for your boot disk (ie. “RASPBIAN”)

On a Mac, type ‘Command-Space’ then “Terminal” and Enter, this should bring up a Command Line. Navigate to the folder that contains the .iso or .img file you want to install (probably found with “cd ~/Downloads”).

At the prompt type “df -h”, which will give you a list of disks mounted on your computer, identify the partition name (likely /dev/disk3s1 or similar), it will be on the same line as the install disk name that you typed above (ie. “RASPBIAN”). You need to unmount the SD card at the location identified above. Type "sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1" to do this.  Now, use ‘dd’ to duplicate the ISO/img onto the SD card, you need to identify the raw disk that will be written to, rather than the partition identified earlier with the “df -h” command. This equates to adding an ‘r’ in front of disk and dropping the ‘s1’ at the end. So for the example above, ‘/dev/disk3s1’ becomes ‘/dev/rdisk3’. Use ‘dd’, duplicate the ISO image onto the SD card with this command "sudo dd bs=1m if=2015-02-16-raspbian-wheezy.img of=/dev/rdisk3"

And now take a break, this will take a while, you computer is now bit-by-bit duplicating the image onto the SD card.

When the terminal returns a prompt, the copy is complete and you should be done with 'installing' the OS onto the SD card. So now remove it from your computer and get ready to fire up your RasPi! Don’t forget to eject the SD card before removing it from your computer.

To the Pi

With the OS image now installed on SD card, insert the card into the slot on the underside of the Pi. Connect the Pi to your TV with an HDMI cable, plug in a USB keyboard and mouse, connect the ethernet port on the RasPi to your router/switch and then plug in the USB power adapter to the RasPi.