We have been waiting a week for our new Raspberry Pi 3 to show up. I ordered the media center plus version.
Yesterday the wait was over as the package came in the mail from the UK, (a day earlier than expected but still no match for the Royal Mail!).
This unit came with a nice red case with room for breakout boards, (those are tertiary boards that stack on top of the main one), a high quality Rii keyboard/laser pointer/mouse combo, 5v power supply, HDMI cable, and a 300mb USB wifi key that works great. Pretty much everything but a screen.
Everything is high quality, and I am happy I got this kit. However, there have been a few challenges.
When I ordered the kit it was dubbed as a media center so I assumed it would come with a familiar desktop or simple CLI even.
Nope, I was wrong. It came with the OPENELEC software which runs a strange, (to me anyway), Operating System called KODI.
It's a little slow and doesn't have a text editor, CLI or a browser.
Huh? I thought these little computers were able to run an Apache server, etc?
Not to worry, they do. But I had to figure it out first. When I ordered the media version it was for the peripheral devices like the Rii remote keyboard combo,now I had to figure out which OS to load and how because this KODI stuff was not going to cut it!
This is a very good product for picking up local wifi signals. It works flawlessly on all platforms.
As per the instructions on the Raspberry Pi website, I downloaded a folder/program called NOOBS that has several flavours of OS included. It was getting late last night, we had our final soccer games and pizza party, and my daughters were repeatedly begging me to figure this thing out so they could watch a movie on it.
Not that it wasn't well past bedtime but yes Daddy loves you and will continue to bang his head against this computational wall!
In order to have the NOOBS files bootable from the sd card, the card must be reformatted in the FAT32 file type.
The card can be formatted to FAT16 as well but only for cards up to 4gb. My card is a 16gb so I'm formatting to FAT32.
As usual, the sd card has issues being recognized at all by my computers, (running Ubuntu 16.4).
I run fdisk -l (without the brackets), in my terminal, and I only see the local storage on my computer.
Plug the sd card in again and again, no result. Hmmm.
Try a different adapter- ok I see it now.
I run fdisk -l again and get the location of my sd card, I keep a mental note of the name the card has been given and it's location on my computer. Something like /dev/mmcblk0p1.
I run the fdisk utility and change some things, namely I type d to delete the partitions,
I type t and then b to select the FAT32 filetype,
I type a to set the permissions to allow booting from this location and finally
I type w to write the changes to the card.
Fdisk utility is successful writing until the end and it fails, saying that the device is in use.
I unmount the card and do this all over again.
After trying the card in the Pi again, I get past the rainbow screen but still get an error, "the fats are not the same".
I actually laughed out loud! Back to the computer, I format the card this time by right clicking on it.
Now I have an empty sd card formatted to FAT32. Great. Progress. Sleep.
All rights, this morning is a new day, I'm sore from last night but I will get this running asap for my little angels.
Go to where I downloaded NOOBS.zip on my computer.
Unzip the file. Wait, it will take a few.
Once unzipped, I enter the NOOBS folder and select all of the contents, right click on them and copy.
On my machine I had to invoke Nautilus, which makes me feel all powerful..:]_
I go back into the sd card and paste the contents into it. The sd card should be empty prior to my pasting in the files.
It will take a few minutes to copy these files and some are very large so I get a coffee.
The NOOBS folder I downloaded had 1.5G of data.
I put the sd card back into the pi 3, plugged everything in and waited.
It started working! I was offered a couple of choices for my OS and I chose the recommended Raspbian.
The Raspbian OS is perfect for my daughters to do their work on, it even comes with minecraft installed which they are crazy about plus all of the libre suite of programs and basically a full desktop setup with everything most people will need.
The IDE area is awesome to help me teach my children more advanced programming techniques and languages.
The IDE's are a real bonus I didn't know was included.
Happy campers!
The bunny was curious as to how this tech works?
The initial hurdles to setting this up are all about the sd card.
If you have a red light but no green, your Pi cannot read the boot files.
Reformat the sd card to FAT32 and replace the files - you should see some action.
In case you are interested in the cost of this kit it came to 150. CAD shipped in the economy style. I purchased the kit from buypi.ca this however is not an endorsement of any kind, I am simply relaying my personal experience.
I hope this helps someone,
peace
