How to remove existing OS installation and reset the size of Raspberry Pi's SD Card

To remove existing OS installation and reset the size of Raspberry Pi's SD Card we are going to use one of the simple partition editor - gparted in Ubuntu/Debian.

Insert the SD Micro SD card that may or may not contains the Raspberry Pi's operating system into your laptops card reader slot. I am assuming that you got a Raspbian OS installed on the SD card during the life of this post :).

On the top right corner of the gparted, choose your SD card properly. You can identify your card using the size in Gigs(14.84GB) or the by checking for a disk name that starts with pattern - mmcblk*. If you choose wrong disk here in this menu, I will not be responsible for anything that sounds like "I lost my personal files" or "I lost my movies" or "my OS is crashed" and so on. See the below image that have the right selection.

Now unmount earch partition by right clikcing on them, if it is already mounted. Ideally the new versions of Ubuntu will mount the partitions automatically unless otherwise you tweak it to not do so.

Once the partition is unmounted, you are ready to delete it.

 

All the changes made so far will be, written to the memory device when the apply button is clicked as in below image.

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Raspberry Pi & accessories - purchase guide in India

All the Raspberry Pi accessories are home yesterday. In India there are lot of online purchase options for raspberry pi and accessories from leading online sellers like ebay.in, amazon etc... I would like to tell you from where I collected it rather than where all it can be purchased( That will be gross, since there are whole lot of providers around here)

 


Raspberry Pi B+ SoC

• https://www.crazypi.com
• http://kitsnspares.com

Both these sites sell comparitively less priced B+ boards than ebay/Amazon during the time of my purchase. I chose CrazyPi and got the delivery within a week of the order.


Clear Case for B+

• amazon.in

There are better cases available in amazon and CrazyPi.com. The one that I chose was cheaper though good looking. B+ got two LEDs on the board with red and green color. FYI, A transparent/acrylic  case will defenitely look geeky, than the clumpsy plastic case


SD card

• http://www.amazon.in

Out of the a whole list of SDcards that Pi can run i just chose - Sandisk Ultra microSDHC 16GB Class 10 Memory Card with Adapter. If you need to know the entire list of SD cards supported by the Raspberry Pi, following page will be handy - http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards


USB Wifi Dongle

• http://www.amazon.in

This is seems to be the cheapest wifi dongle that the B+ can run. Need some work around for installing the firmware for the B+, still range is almost similar to my Xperia mini's antenna.

If you are looking for some other options here is your handbook - http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Wi-Fi_Adapters



USB BlueTooth dongle

• www.amazon.in

Initially I worried whether it will get detected by the rPi, however even during the boot itself you can see the trace of this dongle getting noticed by the Pi.



HDMI cable (if your tv supports hdmi)

• www.ebay.in

Get a cable that is fast and long enough. Ebay got more options than other stores


HDMI to VGA adapter (optional)

• www.crazypi.com

Ordinary HDMI to VGA converters dont work with the Pi. You can get one from carzyPi store that have Digital to analog signal conversion chip. This adapter is completely different from the regular hdmi vga converters available in ebay.


5V/750mA Power adapter ( aka your smartphone's charger)

• www.crazypi.com

If you want a dedicated power adapter, a NOKIA Lumia's power cable will be the easy option that can output 5 Volts and ~750 mA. In all other cases your smartphones charger will be the alternative.

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How to use a pendrive as RAM in Windows

ReadyBoost enables you to plug a USB key into your machine and have Windows Vista use it as memory. I have seen this option "Speed up my system" many times when ever  I plug any USB device into my pc. But not taken it into consideration... And now it is the time to do it and share with you all...

Installation/Configuration
Plug the USB into your machine running Windows Vista/7.
Upon plugging the thumb, the autoplay dialog box will pop with many options how to treat the pen drive just inserted. You can see the "Speed up my system" option in the autoplay dialog box.

Once you click the "Speed up my system" option, the Properties dialog box for the device is displayed where you can specify to start/stop ReadyBoost usage of the device and how much space that can be used as a memory cache. This space is used more as a flash-based page file than true RAM, but the impact is that the more space you choose here, the more benefit you’ll get in terms of overall system performance.

The device properties dialog box will allow you to turn on/off ReadyBoost and to set the exact size of the cache.

(In order to return to this dialog box, open the Computer window, right-click the drive (H: in this case) and select Properties. From there, click the Memory tab (as shown in the previous screen capture and adjust the settings as needed).

Opening the drive in an Explorer window reveals that ReadyBoost has created a cache file of the specified size.

While ReadyBoost will work with other devices – such as SD Card, CompactFlash, etc. – I’ve only used it with a USB key and here are the baseline requirements the team gave me regarding what ReadyBoost will work with:

     +  The USB drive must be at least USB 2.0
     +  The USB Key has to have at least 64mb of free space

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