Configuration Hacks - Raspberry Pi Hacks - page 2

Class 10 Too Classy?
The early Raspberry Pi firmware and bootloader didn't like Class 10 SD cards. This
problem is supposed to have been fixed, but you'll still see people occasionally
running into problems with Class 10 cards, so just be aware that it's a potential
issue. If you have your heart set on a Class 10 card and the first one doesn't work,
try a different brand. In addition, overclocking has been found to cause errors with
Class 6 and Class 10 SD cards, regardless of size or brand, and the errors might
not appear for a few days or weeks. Keep this in mind if you plan to overclock your
Pi.
If decision making isn't your strong suit, you can also keep multiple cards around, each
with a different purpose, for a single Raspberry Pi. If you'd like easy peace of mind,
several vendors sell SD cards preloaded with Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi,
including a card containing NOOBS (New Out-Of-Box Software), which has several
distro options on it. RS Components and element14 offer a card preloaded with
NOOBS as an add-on when you purchase a Raspberry Pi.
NOOBS
NOOBS was designed to make setting up a Raspberry Pi super easy. It supports
multiple OS installations and re-installations, as well as config file editing and web
browsing (to research answers to boot problems) in a pre-boot environment. After
all, this thing was designed for education, and you're not going to learn much if you
can't even get started. It fits on a 4 GB card and gives you multiple choices about
which distro you'd like to set up. After you've chosen, you can always return to the
menu and make a different selection by holding down Shift during boot, either to
try something new or to get a mulligan on a corrupted card. If you don't buy it on
a preloaded card, you can download it from http://www.raspberrypi.org/down
loads .
If you used one of the SD cards that's known to work and you're still having problems,
you should check a few other things. Be sure that you've updated the firmware on the
Pi (see Hack #04 ). If it was not a new SD card, be sure you fully formatted it first, and
make sure you do so for the whole card and not just a partition.
First, find the card's device name:
$ su -c 'fdisk -ls'
or:
$ df -h