Raspberry Pi Quick-Start Tutorial

So you have your brand new Raspberry Pi that you bought from www.pispark.com and you are looking to get up and started as quickly as possible. Here is a quick step by step guide to installing and configuring your Pi's operating system.

1. Acquire an SD card that fits the size for your Pi. Full size SD cards are for models A and B and nano SD cards are used in  models A+ and B+ as well as in the Raspberry Pi 2. It is recommended that your SD card size is at least 8GB.
2. Download NOOBS from here. This is the software released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for new users to quickly get started. Unzip the files for use later on.
3. Download and install the SD card formatting software for the platform you are using from here.
4. Insert your SD card into your computer. You may need a SD to USB adapter if your computer does not have SD card slots for your size card. After your card is inserted start the SD card formatting software and select the drive where your SD card is located and format it.
5. After the card is formatted drag an drop the unzipped NOOBS files into the SD card.
6. Now eject your SD card and put it into your Raspberry Pi.
7. Now that the card is in your Pi make sure that you have a USB mouse and keyboard plugged in and that the Pi is hooked up to a monitor or TV. Once that is done connect your Pi to power over its micro-USB port. Most Android phone chargers will work for this.
8. Upon being connected to power your Pi will begin to boot. If the SD card formatting was done successfully you should see a menu with various operating systems that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has compiled. We recommend you pick the Raspbian operating system because it is the most widely used raspberry Pi operating system and has a great community backing it up. Just click its icon and hit install.
9. Now on first boot of Raspbian you will come to a configuration menu. Here you can set things such as the system time. You can use the TAB key to navigate to the finish button when done.
10. After that you should be greeted by a command prompt asking for a username. By default the Raspbian username is pi. Enter pi and hit enter. It will then ask for a password. By default the Rapbian password is raspberry. Enter that and hit enter once again.
11. You will now be logged into your Pi and ready to go. Here you have full access to a Linux system via the command line. If you wish to start a more familiar desktop environment enter the command startx and your Pi will load a full featured desktop environment.

Now you should be ready to get started on your Raspberry Pi project. Get out there and get making!