We’re now ready to boot our Raspberry Pi for the very first time. For these workshops I’m using this Raspberry 3 Model B and I have plugged into it a HDMI lead for video, a wireless keyboard and mouse in the USB ports, power here and on the back side is the SD card slot with the SD card we flashed in the last video.

Just after plugging in the power this is what we’re presented with - this is our Boot Menu and we’re going to select to install Raspian, so lets install that.

We’ll go back into that (00 min 39 sec) and welcome to Pixel Powered by Raspian, and here we are in our very first boot up. This should look pretty familiar to people who are used to using a Windows or Mac - we’ve got our Applications Bar at the top, a nice desktop and a waste basket and if you desktop looks a little different to mine don’t worry about that, we’ll talk about that in a different video.

So, let’s just get this thing set up I guess. The first thing we should do is get rid of these weird black bars that are around the edges of the screen.  These are called the overscan lines and we can go to the Pi button which is like our start menu and let’s go to preferences and Raspberry Pi configuration. Here we go, underscan (01 min 33 sec) so we want to disable underscan. That will require a reboot so I’m just going to hit ’No’ for now but the next time we reboot the Pi the desktop should fill the entire screen.

Other things we should do are set up the keyboard properly - if you try to type in special characters like the hash # or the dollar sign $ you might find you get symbols that you didn’t intend to type like the British Pound symbol. That’s because the Raspberry Pi is British and its set up for a British keyboard. So we’re just going to go into Keyboard and Mouse settings and lets go to keyboard layout and because I’m using a US style keyboard I need to go to the United States. I’m just going to put in English US. So now if I put in the hash # symbol, that is what comes up. If we were still in United Kingdom then you get the Pound Symbol when you want to enter the hash # - that can be clearly  quite annoying to have an improperly set up keyboard when you need to do some programming. Thats enough for that and finally because I am using a Raspberry Pi model 3 B I do have the option to connect to a wireless network and here they are (02 min 56 sec) so if I wanted to connect to this guest network I can click there and type in the key and that would connect me to WiFi.

So that completes the basic set up of the Pi so let’s actually have a look at what we can do with it.

Let’s start with the Applications Bar, we have this web browser icon here so of course if we click that we get a pretty familiar looking web browser. Now I’m not connected to WiFi at the moment but of course we could be and we could start browsing the internet - let’s close that. We have a familiar looking file system - so we’ve started off in this Pi directory which is our home directory for the current user which is called Pi and you can see we’ve got /home/Pi, that slash is the root directory. Its the top most level directory and then the file system is organised underneath that and our home directory is Pi, we could have a look through the rest of the file system but it’s not particularly interesting.

We have a Terminal and we’re going to be using a lot of this in future videos. This is a very powerful tool with how we’re going to interact with the Raspberry Pi. We also have the Mathematica and Wolfram suites which are useful for doing math and writing math scripts.

Under programming we have plenty of programming options and I think we’re going to focus mostly on Python down the track. In office we have a few office tools, we’ve got Minecraft and of course just a few accessories and applications.

So that completes this section. At this point your Raspberry Pi could be used as a very small, very low powered desktop computer and you can continue to use it in that way.

In the next video we’re going to take a closer look  at that terminal.