Installing and configuring Raspbian Jessie on a Raspberry Pi B+

I blogged before about configuring a Raspberry Pi B+ with Raspbian Wheezy. Here are some notes I took today while going through the whole process again, but this time with the latest Raspbian version, Jessie, from 2015-11-21. Many steps are the same, but I will add instructions for configuring a wireless connection.

1) Bought micro SD card. Note: DO NOT get a regular SD card for the B+ because it will not fit in the SD card slot. You need a micro SD card.

2) Inserted the SD card via an SD USB adaptor in my MacBook Pro.

3) Went to the command line and ran df to see which volume the SD card was mounted as. In my case, it was /dev/disk2s1.

4) Unmounted the SD card from my Mac. I initially tried 'sudo umount /dev/disk2s1' but the system told me to use 'diskutil unmount', so the command that worked for me was:

$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1

5) Downloaded 2015-11-21-raspbian-jessie.zip from  https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images. Unzipped it to obtain the image file 2015-11-21-raspbian-jessie.img

6) Used dd to copy the image from my Mac to the SD card. Thanks to an anonymous commenter on my previous blog post, I specified the target of the dd command as the raw device /dev/rdisk2. Note: DO NOT specify the target as /dev/disk2s1 or /dev/rdisk2s1. Either /dev/disk2 or /dev/rdisk2 will work, but copying to the raw device is faster. Here is the dd command I used:

$ sudo dd if=2015-11-21-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m

3752+0 records in

3752+0 records out

3934257152 bytes transferred in 233.218961 secs (16869371 bytes/sec)

7) I unmounted the SD card from my Mac one more time:

$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1

8) I inserted the SD card into my Raspberry Pi. I also inserted a USB WiFi adapter (I used the Wi-Pi 802.11n adapter). My Pi was also connected to a USB keyboard, to a USB mouse and to a monitor via HDMI. 

9) I powered up the Pi. It went through the Raspbian Jessie boot process uneventfully, and it brought up the X Windows GUI interface (which is the default in Jessie, as opposed to the console in Wheezy). At this point, I configured the Pi to boot back into console mode by going to Menu -> Preferences -> Raspberry Pi Configuration and changing the Boot option from "To Desktop" to "To CLI". While in the configuration dialog, I also changed the default password for user pi, and unchecked the autologin option.

10) I rebooted the Pi and this time it booted up in console mode and stopped at the login prompt. I logged in as user pi.

11) I spent the next 30 minutes googling around to find out how to make the wireless interface work. It's always been a chore for me to get wlan to work on a Pi, hence the following instructions (based on this really good blog post).

12) Edit /etc/network/interfaces:

(i)  change "auto l0" to "auto wlan0"

(ii) change "iface wlan0 inet manual" to "iface wlan0 inet dhcp"

13) Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and add this at the end:

network={

  ssid="your_ssid"

  psk="your_ssid_password"

}

14) Rebooted the Pi and ran ifconfig. At this point I could see wlan0 configured properly with an IP address.

Hope these instructions work for you. Merry Christmas!