Phil’s Adventures with his Raspberry Pi: Part Two

So, the story so far from part one is that I’ve got the actual Pi itself, the power cable, sound cable and, hopefully, a working HDMI > VGA cable but the only thing missing from starting the Pi up was an SD card.

So, one trip to Argos and purchase of a SanDick SDHC Class 4 8 Gb card later (£14.99) I now have everything I need – I hope – to get it working.

Firstly I need to install the boot information to the SD card. Heading over to http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads. For my Windows PC I firstly needed to download and install http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml (avoiding the misleading RAR extraction tool advert at the top).

As I am a beginner to this I went for the Debian “squeeze” download available on the Raspberry Pi website and installed using the second edition of the useful MagPi magazine as help.

Opening the Win 32 Disk Imager I located the image file and selected the device to right to (in my case ‘D’) then pressed ‘write’. Make sure you don’t make the mistake I did and have the SD card open in Windows Explorer at the same time as you’ll get an error.

With the software installed it was time to get it to work!

Now the first stumbling block was, as feared, the HDMI > VGA connector was a dud and didn’t work. So, with a bit of a change of plan, connected it to the flat screen TV using HDMI and this worked fine, booting up and allowing me to log-in using the log-in details provided on the website and then entering ‘startx’ into the command prompt to open up the GUI. And there was the Raspberry Pi in all its glory.

Now to test the other elements.

The next stumbling block was the keyboard and mouse. The ones downstairs are PS/2 connections so I had to use the USB ones from another PC so two converters need to be purchased to connect them to the USB hub we already had (though for cost I’m just going to buy a cheap USB keyboard and mouse), plus a USB A > USB B cable as I had to cannibalise another one. Problem solved for that.

I tried putting in the Western Digital hard drive I had into the Raspberry Pi and after a few error messages and a ten minute wait it finally mounted successfully and I could access the drive. My memory stick, thankfully, loaded quickly.

I am pleased to see that the Linux software is very like Windows and intuitive to use and even comes with its own music player, which is good, though for some reason I cannot get any sound out of it even though the website confirms that sound through HDMI works (and removing the HDMI gave the familiar noise of sound being pulled out) but none of the music would play even when I plugged in the headphone out > phono cables so this is the second problem I need to solve.

So some progress and though not as smooth an installation as I would hope there has been progress.

Problems to solve:
Connecting up the Raspberry Pi to my ordinary VGA monitor
Working out how to get sound of it
Waiting for the keyboard, mouse and USB cable to turn up
What to do with my spare SD card

Stay tuned as I try and solve these problems!

Total cost spent so far:
Raspberry Pi £29.46
Power Cable £03.94
3.5 Jack > dual phone £00.75
VGA Converter (Dud) £06.07
USB Keyboard £06.07
USB Mouse £04.24
USB A > B £00.81
TOTAL £51.34