Getting Your Raspberry Pi Up and Running - Raspberry Pi Projects - page 6

Images
When talking about downloading the OS for the Raspberry Pi, you may hear it called an
image, which may be slightly confusing. It is an image of the underlying storage. (Imagine
an aerial photo of the entire sports ield of storage blocks, even the blank ones, rather than
separate iles! If you were to print this photo at the same size on another sports ield, you'd
have an exact copy of all the iles stored on the original one.)
It is possible to store an image as a single ile in another ilesystem, but this arrangement is
not suitable for a running Raspberry Pi. As such, a Raspberry Pi will not work if you just copy
an image onto a FAT-formatted card. Instead, you must tell your OS that you want to trans-
fer it at the block level, so that every block on your card matches those of the person who
made the image. That way, Linux interprets these underlying blocks on the disk to provide
a ilesystem that is identical to the person who made the image.
In summary, ilesystem images provide an easy way of cloning an entire ilesystem such
that all the iles, their permissions, attributes, dates, and so on are identical.
Creating Your Own SD Card
here are two ways to create your own SD card for the Raspberry Pi, using NOOBS or by
transferring an image yourself.
Using NOOBS
New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS) was created for the Raspberry Pi to automate transferring
SD card images. NOOBS boots your Raspberry Pi from a FAT-formatted card and then reparti-
tions and clones the ilesystem for you. Using NOOBS should be as simple as formatting a card
on your desktop PC and unzipping NOOBs downloaded from www.raspberrypi.org/
downloads . Some operating systems do not format cards properly, so it is sometimes neces-
sary to download a program to format the card. Although NOOBS can be simple, it doesn't
always work, and it can be slower. Anyway, it's more satisfying to use the do-it-yourself
approach.
Transferring an Image Yourself
You need an SD card larger than 2GB to it the OS on it. A 4GB card is ideal.
Visit www.raspberrypi.org/downloads and follow the links to download the latest ver-
sion of Raspbian. You are looking for a ilename containing the word raspbian and a date,
and that ends in .zip . Make a note of the letters and numbers that are shown as SHA-1
checksum. Because of the speed of development, new versions are released frequently, so the
exact name will difer from the one that's used in the following instructions. he location you