To strengthen the computer park of your home, it is not necessary to spend a fortune. Here’s a guide to get you there, step by step.
Whether you are in Covid-19 containment or not, it can be practical to quickly have an additional computer station at home, whether for teleworking, to allow children to connect to digital school. or simply for leisure. One way to do this inexpensively is to use a Raspberry Pi card. It’s a real computer that costs only a few dozen euros. You just have to put together a few peripherals to make a complete computer station.
1. Prepare the materials
To create your new workstation, you will need:
- a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 board with its case and power supply
- a USB keyboard
- a USB mouse
- a screen with HDMI
- a 16 GB or more micro SD card
- an adapter for an SD card reader
- a computer with an SD card reader
Connect the screen, keyboard and mouse to the corresponding sockets on your Raspberry Pi board.
2. Recover the Raspbian system
On your classic computer, download the most complete version of the Raspian system from the site raspberrypi.org. After a possible decompression, you will then obtain an image file. It has an IMG extension and is around 7 gigabytes in size.
3. Flash the system on the micro SD card
Download and install the Etcher software. It will allow you to easily flash Raspbian system to SD card. To do this, slide the micro SD card into its adapter, and the whole thing into the SD card reader of your computer. Launch Etcher, select the image file to flash, then select the micro SD card. Then press “Flash!”. The operation lasts a few minutes.
4. Start and configure Raspbian
Take the SD card out of its adapter and insert it into your Raspberry Pi card. When you connect the power supply to the latter, the Raspbian system will automatically launch and display a series of configuration screens: language and location, password user, Wi-Fi network password, system update.
5. Use your new computer station
Raspbian immediately embeds a series of software such as the Libre Office office suite, the Chromium web browser, the Minecraft game or the development environment for children Scratch. You can also install others, like the excellent GIMP image editor.
You have two methods: go through a command line (“sudo apt-get install gimp”), or through the “Add / Remove Software” software which lists all the software packages available in each section. Enjoy!
