I finally got my own Raspberry Pi; a credit-card-sized computer that’s very cheap and low-power.

It didn’t come with any of the niceties that you would expect from another computer, such as a power supply or a case, or keyboard, monitor, or anything else. Basically, it’s like being given the motherboard of a desktop computer and you need to do the rest yourself.

So first thing was to install the operating system on it. This was easy. Just buy an SD card, and download the ISO of the OS that you want and copy it onto the card.

I already had a micro-SD card from an old Bada phone, so I just stuck that in an adaptor to bring it up to SD card size, then installed the Fedora remix using the Fedora Arm Installer. Painless.

Next, we need to connect the machine to the network.

My network is mostly WiFi-based, so I chose to hook the RaspPi to the network by piping its network through my laptop.

We need to set up the laptop so it can hand out IP addresses. Install a DHCP server on your laptop. I’m using Fedora, so installed with “yum install dhcp”, then edited /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf:

option domain-name "example.org";
option domain-name-servers ns1.example.org, ns2.example.org;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
log-facility local7;
subnet 10.5.5.0 netmask 255.255.255.224 {
  range 10.5.5.26 10.5.5.30;
  option domain-name-servers ns1.internal.example.org;
  option domain-name "internal.example.org";
  option routers 10.5.5.1;
  option broadcast-address 10.5.5.31;
  default-lease-time 600;
  max-lease-time 7200;
} 

Then start the DHCP server with “service dhcpd start”.

Next, we need to connect the laptop to the RaspPi. To do this, I made a cross-over cable, and plugged it into the RaspPi.

Before plugging it into the laptop, we need to tell the laptop’s network manager not to set up DHCP over eth0 (as we’re the server, not the client, as far as the cable is concerned). To do this in Gnome, right-click your netowkr icon on the top-right, click Network Settings, and in Wired, click Options, then change the type to “Shared connection” (or whatever sounds like that).

Now plugin the ethernet cable into the laptop, then plug a USB cable into the laptop and the RaspPi.

If you “tail -f /var/log/messages”, you should get something like the below after a minute:

Sep 28 21:12:30 iga dnsmasq-dhcp[30147]: DHCPDISCOVER(em1) 192.168.1.19 b8:27:eb:87:1d:86
Sep 28 21:12:30 iga dnsmasq-dhcp[30147]: DHCPOFFER(em1) 10.42.0.62 b8:27:eb:87:1d:86
Sep 28 21:12:30 iga dnsmasq-dhcp[30147]: DHCPREQUEST(em1) 10.42.0.62 b8:27:eb:87:1d:86
Sep 28 21:12:30 iga dnsmasq-dhcp[30147]: DHCPACK(em1) 10.42.0.62 b8:27:eb:87:1d:86 raspi

That 10.42.0.62 is the address of the RaspPi. You can ssh into it (username root, password fedoraarm), and do stuff!