Configure your Pi

Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• Why are things spelled funny?

• Why does my keyboard not work right?

Objectives

• Getting ready to do work.

When you start your Raspberry Pi for the first time, there are some things we should configure before you start working. There is a handy-dandy script called raspi-config that can configure a lot of basic stuff. In addition, in the guide below, I’ll share some of the actual commands behind the scenes that are being run. But rasp-config is a shell script (written in bash) and so you can actually look at the script to see how it works.

You’ll need to start raspi-config with sudo because its needs root privileges to change most configuration options.

sudo raspi-config

The script uses a system called “whiptail” that provides a sort of graphical user environment in a terminal window. You can use arrow keys to make a selection in a list, the “tab” to move to different buttons, “space” to pick or toggle a selection, and “enter” to select the option currently indicated.

Set a Secure Password

Initially, the pi comes with a single user account (“pi”) and the password is set to “raspberry”. You should reset this password before you connect to the network. Even a few minutes on the network with the default password set could result in your computer being compromised.

There are many guidelines for choosing a secure “memorized secret”. The National Institutes of Standards and Technologies (NIST) has an appendix (A) at the end of their Digital Identity Guidelines that provides some guidance for choosing a good password.

Localisation options

By default, your Raspberry Pi starts up configured for use in England. We should set some things things up so it will work correctly in your environment.

Change Locale

Select “Change Locale”, scroll to “en_US.UTF-8”, hit the space bar to select it, use tab to move to and hit enter.

You may notice that en_GB.UTF8 is already selected. You should leave it selected.

The next screen asks you to set the “default locale”. Choose “en_US.UTF-8”, use tab to move to and hit enter.

You can perform the same actions by editing /etc/locale.gen, uncommenting the line with en_US.UTF-8, and running these two commands

$ sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
$ sudo update-locale en_US.UTF-8

Set the timezone

In raspi-config, select “Localisation options” then “Change Timezone”. For UMass, select “US” then “Eastern.”

Or you can edit /etc/timezone and replace the contents with “US/Eastern”.

Set the hostname

Use raspi-config or replaced “raspberry pi” in both /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts.

Key Points

• Be productive quickly.