Smart Cities 2021

Smart Cities 2021

Navigation on the Raspberry Pi

• In this first home lesson we will be learning how to start doing some basic activities with the Raspberry Pi.

Learning Objectives

• Learn how to navigate the Linux directory
• Finding the Raspberry Pi internal IP address
• Make directories and files in the Terminal
• Learn how to read and modify files
• Updating the Raspberry Pi system software library

Learn how to navigate the Linux directory

Open the Raspberry Pi Terminal

• From the Raspberry Pi desktop open up the Terminal.
• The Terminal is the small black box looking icon at the top left of the Desktop
• When you open the Terminal it will appear as a large window with a black background.
• All inputs to this window will be text (command based). We won't use a mouse.

Adjusting font settings

• When you first open the Terminal you may need to adjust the Font settings.
• To edit settings, from the top drop-down menu select Edit > Preferences.
• Click on the box to the right of Terminal font.

• This will open up another window where you can adjust font size and type.
• Increase the font size to 18.
• Click Select and then OK to make the changes permanent.

Navigating on the Raspberry Pi

Check for files and directories

• Now that we know how to open up the Terminal we can use it to navigate around the Raspberry Pi.
• When we start we are in the user pi home directory.
• To list all the files and directories we enter the command ls
• You should see a list appear:
  • white items are files
  • blue items are directories (directories can be empty, or have other files and directories inside)

Navigating up and down directories

• The directory structure on the Raspberry Pi is arranged in the form of a tree.
• To go back down the tree - towards the root - we need to enter the command cd .. (cd and two dots)
• cd is short for Change Directory
• Every time we enter this command (cd ..) it will take us down the tree.
• The Terminal tells us that we have moved down one branch and are now in the /home directory

• If we enter the command cd .. again it will take us right down to the root of the tree.
• This is symbolised by the / (forward slash) symbol.

• Using the ls command we can have a look around to see what branches are coming up out of the root (/) directory.
• Enter the command ls