Tell It What To Be

Cosy Computing

03. Tell It What To Be.

Right.. I've done the bit I am used to - plugging things into other things - and am now heading into the territory of software in detail for the first time. Not as a user, but as someone really trying to figure out what is actually going on. I warn you now, I'm going to make lots of mistakes, wrong assumptions and corrections as part of this process.

I'm going to be going backwards and forwards a lot as part of this. If I just waited till I understood everything before turning it on, the stall wouldn't have a computer at all, and I wouldn't understand anything even half so well. I'm going to just get in there and get stuff working. But I will come back to anything I haven't got to grips with and look at it again. I want to understand how levels of language in the computer communicate. For example, what is actually happening when I type something like this for it to be able to appear almost instantly in light. Our society is increasingly based on this ability, and I want to know more about what makes it happen. We've built these spindly complicated structures and I want to see the part where that makes contact with the ground.

Earlier on, I said that I had put "NOOBS" on the SD card. This 'New Out Of Box Software' is a way for "noobs" or newbies like myself to be able to easily choose and install operating systems for the Pi, using the Pi itself. An operating sytem basically makes the computer work, it tells it what kind of computer to be. It commmunicates between you and the hardware of the computer, or between other software and the hardware. It's the bit that makes the computer useable. Interestingly to me, the operating system also defines how you as a user interact with the computer. Windows is an OS. An OS is not one piece of software but a lot of things bundled together. I don't yet know how this works, or quite how it sits in the chain of command, but I'm going to get cracking and come back at this from the other side.

To put NOOBS onto the SD card, I followed the instructions on the Raspberry Pi website. I won't go into a lot of detail about that as it all happened on another machine. Then I put the card in, powered up the Pi and used NOOBS to install the OS "Raspbian", which is a version of Linux (Debian Wheezy) optimised for the Pi.

Linux is an Open Source operating system. Open Source means that what it is made of is available freely for anyone. The Raspberry Pi is Open Source hardware (Here are the schematics for this Model B). Linux is Open Source software. This enabes you to see how everything works, and also to be able to alter any part of it to suit your needs. Open Source is about giving users and makers knowledge and control of computing rather than allowing others to define what you can and cannot do. Basically, if you can be bothered to work it out, you can do anything. I am new to Linux and looking forward to being able to tinker about with the software to learn what makes things happen.

So I powered up and followed the instructions on NOOBS to install Rasbian, which is a very general OS recommended for beginners. It should allow me to try out lots of things because it contains software that supports a lot of different activities.

As the Pi starts up in Raspbian, you get lines and lines of text scrolling on the screen. This is very familiar to me from my early computing days. My old computers used to tell me what they were doing as they started up. My laptop doesn't do that. It shows me a logo instead. I prefer the text. I don't yet understand what it all means, but I hope to one day.

Once it is set up, it asks me to log in with the default username and password, which you can change at any point.

Once logged in, Raspbian is ready to go. I can communicate with it in two ways. I can type instructions directly to the machine (Command Line), or I can use a visual representation I can click on using a mouse (Graphical User Interface or GUI). They both do the same thing, they are just different ways of communicating. The GUI is more intuitive, and has a windows-like structure. The command line gives you more efficient control if you know how to use it. I'll be using a bit of both to start out. I haven't yet worked out how to take screen captures, but once I can do that, I can show a bit more rather than talking about it. Above you can see what it looks like to talk to the command line. It I type "startx" it brings up the GUI. Once in the GUI I can open the terminal in a window by double clicking on "terminal". So I can use a mixture of command line commands and clicking on things.

So as you can see, I have currently got my Raspberry Pi set up with fairly recogniseable features of a personal computer. I'm going to gradually move from this familiarity to direct interaction and specifying exactly what I want it to do and how to do it.