Operation Manual

drive letter to choose, open My Computer or Windows Explorer to check.
6. Click the Write button to flash the image file to the SD card. This process takes a while, so be patient!
No matter which operating system you’re writing from, it’s important to ensure you leave the SD card connected until the image has been
completely written. If you don’t, you may find that Pi doesn’t boot when the SD card is connected. If this happens, start the process again.
When the image has been flashed onto the SD card, remove it from the computer and insert it into the Raspberry Pi’s SD card slot, located
underneath the circuit board. The SD card should be inserted with the label facing away from the board and pushed fully home to ensure a good
connection.
Connecting External Storage
While the Raspberry Pi uses an SD card for its main storage device—known as a boot device—you may find that you run into
space limitations quite quickly. Although large SD cards holding 32 GB, 64 GB or more are available, they are often prohibitively
expensive.
Thankfully, there are devices that provide an additional hard drive to any computer when connected via a USB cable. Known as
USB Mass Storage (UMS) devices, these can be physical hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs) or even portable pocket-sized
flash drives (see Figure 1-6).
Figure 1-6: Two USB Mass Storage devices: a pen drive and an external hard drive
The majority of USB Mass Storage devices can be read by the Pi, whether or not they have existing content. In order for the Pi
to be able to access these devices, their drives must be mounted—a process you will learn in Chapter 2, “Linux System
Administration”. For now, it’s enough to connect the drives to the Pi in readiness.
Connecting the Network
While the majority of these setup instructions are equally applicable to both the Raspberry Pi Model A and the Model B,
networking is a special exception. To keep the component count—and therefore the cost—as low as possible, the Model A
doesn’t feature any onboard networking. Thankfully, that doesn’t mean you can’t network the Model A; only that you’ll need
some additional equipment to do so.
Networking the Model A
To give the Model A the same networking capabilities as its more expensive Model B counterpart, you’ll need a USB-connected Ethernet adapter. This
connects to a free USB port on the Raspberry Pi or a connected hub and provides a wired Ethernet connection with an RJ45 connector, the same as is
available on the Model B.
A 10/100 USB Ethernet adapter—with the numbers referring to its two-speed mode, 10 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s—can be purchased from online retailers for very
little money. When buying an Ethernet adapter, be sure to check that Linux is listed as a supported operating system. A few models only work with
Microsoft Windows, and are incompatible with the Raspberry Pi.