Setting Up Raspberry Pi
The raspberry pi is a mini computer with GPIO pins that can be used to interface with various sensors and actuators. More information of the raspberry pi can be found here
The SD card should be of a size greater than 4GB, especially if you want to install Raspbian Jesse.
Connect the card to your computer and get its id. To do this:
sudo fdisk -l
If you do the above command before inserting the card and after inserting the card, you'll find a new addition which is the card.
Format the card to fat partition. To do this:
sudo umount /dev/sdcardfound
sudo mkfs.fat /dev/sdcardfound
After this the sd card is ready for use.
Download the OS from here:raspbian, and unzip it. I chose Raspbian Jesse with Desktop for my OS.
unzip downloadedraspbian.zip
Then burn the OS into the sd card using dd:
sudo dd if=unzippedraspbian.img of=/dev/sdcardfound bs=4M status= progress
Once this step is completed the OS is ready for use.
With Screen, Keyboard and Mouse
Attach the sd card, screen, keyboard and mouse to the raspberry pi. For power, a supply rated 5V 2.5A is recommended. In my case, I used one rate 5V and 1A and it worked well. When powered, there are two LED lights, a red one and a green one. The red should be on indicating the pi is receiving power. The green light should be blinking. If it is not this indicated either a problem with the sd card or the power supply.
Once the pi is started, wait until the desktop environment is loaded. Then you can then enable vnc and ssh.
To do this, go to the terminal and type:
sudo raspi-config
Go to interface and enable both vnc and ssh.
You can also go to MENU > PREFERENCES > Interfaces. From this you can also enable ssh and vnc.
To set up a virtual keyboard, first connect to a wifi/LAN network and do:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install matchbox-keyboard
sudo reboot
The keyboard should be in accessibility menu. If it isn't go to MENU > Preferences > Main Menu Editor > Accesorites. Disable and enable the Keyboard option.
To ssh into the pi, first get the ip address. To do this, hover on the wifi icon and the ip will be displayed. You can also get the ip address from the terminal by running:
ip address show
From another computer, run:
ssh pi@piipaddress
The password is : raspberry
The pi already comes with a vnc server known as realvnc. So just install the viewer on your laptop and use it. For archlinux:
yaourt -S realvnc-vnc-viewer
Then confirm that vnc is enabled on the pi. To use it:
vncviewer piipaddress
Realvnc can also be setup to run via the cloud. Just visit their website here:realvnc to find out how.