Raspberry Pi - Getting Started (& ready for hardware hacking)

So, it was all plain sailing getting the Pi up and running with NOOBS following the instructions there, and quickly got it all setup with wifi connectivity and ssh access (which is essential for me, as I don't have a HDMI monitor other than my TV in the living room - so until I could get ssh access from my normal workstation it meant having to take over the living room to configure the Pi on the TV, which my wife was not best pleased about! Also a much cheaper option than buying a new HDMI monitor just for the Pi).

I had been looking around for how to get started with some hardware hacking with the Pi, and must admit the last time I did anything vaguely electronics was when I was in school at 14yrs old (actually I did a robotics module in uni, but that was still mostly programming stuff rather than actual chips/resistors/wires etc).  Some of blogs were writing about how great/essential the Adafruit Pi Cobbler was, and again, I had to go and google and read up exactly what a breakout "cobbler" would be useful for etc but decided that enough people were going for it to invest


(So yeah, that's the Amazon affiliates link - it means I get some money from amazon if you buy this thing from here - it doesn't cost you anything, but is nice for me, so by all means click & buy!)

That lead me on to looking more extensivley at the adafruit site, which has some nice tutorials and all recommend using the Occidentalis OS if you are planning some hardware hacking.

Setting up Occidentalis OS

Occidentalis doesn't come in as nice a package as NOOBS - You basically need to get the image, flash it to an SD card, then boot up your Pi.  I'm on Windows 7 setting up the SD card, so here are the steps/software I used:

• SD Formatter (from the SD association - this is one of the standard tools recommended in normal Pi setup tutorials and is a pretty convenient way to format SD cards) - https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/
• Fedora ARM installer - This can be used to install OS images on to an SD card - you can't just copy & paste downloaded images on to an SD card and this just makes it pretty easy - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_ARM_Installer
• Occidentalis distro image - This is Adafruit's mod of the Raspian Wheezy OS and is modified specifically with hardware hacking in mind - The latest version is currently at v0.2 - http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-raspberry-pi-educational-linux-distro/occidentalis-v0-dot-2

Getting the Occidentalis image and flashing it to an SD card is pretty straight forward if you have the above software - the steps are as follows:

1. Format an SD card - it really needs to be 4gb - I am using an 8gb samsung card that is working fine (disclaimer: as with any formatting or writing images to drives - make sure you are targeting the correct drive for your appropriate SD card - as all data will be wiped!)
2. Assuming you have downloaded the Occidentalis image from the above link, extract the zip file locally
3. Right-click and select "Run as administrator" on the Fedora ARM installer executable.  For the source option, select "Browse" and navigate to the .img file you have just extracted from the zip. For the destination triple-check that you have your SD card drive selected (again, this drive will be wiped and all data overwritten when you hit the install button). Then press install. This will correctly setup the SD card with the OS image.
4. Jam your newly setup SD card in your Raspberry Pi and startup as usual. For most of the boiler plate setup, this will work just like Wheezy/NOOBS setup.

Uh.. Wait.. My Pi isn't Booting..