Requirements:
- Raspberry Pi
- Power Supply (2.5 amp recommended)
- Micro SD Card (8GB min.)
- Raspberry Pi Zero, Zero W, A+, B+, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, 3B+ and Raspberry Pi 4 you’ll need a micro SD card. Others use a standard size SD Card.
- Keyboard/Mouse
- I use the following for simplicity as it provides a wireless keyboard and mouse combo.
Download
Use an SD card with a minimum capacity of 8GB.
- Using a computer with an SD card reader, visit the Downloads page.
- Click on NOOBS, then click on the
Download ZIP
button under ‘NOOBS (offline and network install)’, and select a folder to save it to. - Extract the files from the zip.
Format your SD card
It is best to format your SD card before copying the NOOBS files onto it. To do this:
- Visit the SD Association’s website and download SD Formatter 4.0 for either Windows or Mac.
- Follow the instructions to install the software.
- Insert your SD card into the computer or laptop’s SD card reader and make a note of the drive letter allocated to it, e.g. G:/
- In SD Formatter, select the drive letter for your SD card and format it.
Drag and drop NOOBS files
- Once your SD card has been formatted, drag all the files in the extracted NOOBS folder and drop them onto the SD card drive.
- The necessary files will then be transferred to your SD card.
- When this process has finished, safely remove the SD card and insert it into your Raspberry Pi.
First boot
- Plugin your keyboard, mouse, and monitor cables.
- Now plug the USB power cable into your Raspberry Pi.
- Your Raspberry Pi will boot, and a window will appear with a list of different operating systems that you can install.
- Tick the box next to Raspbian and click on
Install
. - Raspbian will then run through its installation process. Note that this can take a while.
- When the install process has completed, the Raspberry Pi configuration menu (raspi-config) will load. Here you are able to set the time and date for your region, enable a Raspberry Pi camera board, or even create users. You can exit this menu by using Tab on your keyboard to move to
Finish
.
Logging in and accessing the graphical user interface
The default login for Raspbian is username
pi
with the password raspberry
. Note that you will not see any writing appear when you type the password. This is a security feature in Linux.