I finally got my christmas rasberry pi up and running. I had to redo the power grid to my room to properly support all the things I have plugged in upstairs. I live in a 100 year old farm house so now my room has as many outlets as the entire upstairs. Plus I had a few other issues that slowed me down in getting it done until now.

Here’s a couple of notes I took while working on this project.

Have to have an HDMI monitor with noobs. Also keyboard and mouse.

If you’re using NOOBS Lite, you’ll need to have a wired connection. For reasons (100 year old farm house), I needed to share the wireless across the wired connection of my laptop. I run KDE fedora linux and this guide talks setting up sharing wireless to a wired connection via KNetwork: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=126285.

Use gparted to format SDCard. FAT32 is alright. Unzip with unzip -d destination ~/Downloads/NOOBS_lite_v1_3_4.zip

I chose arch linux because its small (so less download time on my very slow internet connection and i presume updated more then pidora (which is based on fedoraredhat and a distro I am more familiar with.)

after it says 100% you need to let it sit awhile or you will bork the install

Reboot into your fresh pi install. Run wifi-menu to setup wireless connection.

At this point you can either do the following configuration while connected on the tv or over ssh.

You can check your router for the IP address, or you can nmap scan. Either way, ssh to it and use root/root for login and password.

Enabling onboot wireless:
systemctl enable netctl-auto@wlan0
probably want to setup a static ip address
nano /etc/netctl/wlan0

Something like this is what you need after editing /etc/netctl/wlan0.

Description='Automatically generated profile by wifi-menu'
Interface=wlan0
Connection=wireless
Security=wpa
ESSID=ssid
Key=wpa password
IP=static
Address='10.13.37.7/24'
Gateway='10.13.37.1'
DNS=('10.13.37.1')

pacman -Syu to update the distor.

change the hostname by editing /etc/hostname

Change the root password. You’re internet facing now.

Time to reboot and enjoy your pi.