Cables
------

I had to buy two cables to get the Raspberry Pi working: a micro USB cable
to connect power and an HDMI-to-DVI cable to connect video. Amazon had very
inexpensive cables that work correctly and seem to be very well made.

HMDI-to-DVI $5.99 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004S4R5CK/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

micro USB $5.79
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ES5ZSW/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01

Raspberry Pi from Mac OS X
--------------------------

After downloading RaspPiImage.zip, I double-clicked to decode it. That
produced a new file RaspPiImage.zip.cpgz. Double-clicking that decoded to
another zip. That didn't seem like progress, so I tried decoding it with
Stuffit Expander. That worked correctly. Stuffit Expander is a free
download, available here:

http://www.stuffit.com/mac-expander.html

I thought I could just use Disk Utility to copy the disk image to the 16 GB
SD card we bought. That didn't work. There are two visible partitions on the
disk image, one of which is a Linux-format partition. Something about that
causes Disk Utility to fail doing a restore with an error complaining that
the source image can't be verified. Fortunately, there's a way to do it with
a lower-level command line utility included in the system called dd.

To set up the SD card:

- Insert the SD card into a card reader. I used the built-in card reader on
my MacBook Air.

- The card should show up in the Finder. Run Disk Utility (from the
Applications/Utilities folder), find the SD card on the left, select the
volume associated with that device, and then click on the "Unmount" button.
(Do not click on the Eject button.) This unmounts the volume but leaves the
card connected so we can blast it with the disk image bits.

- Now we need to figure out the low-level (BSD) name to use to access the SD
card. In Disk Utility, click on the item for the card reader and then click
on the Info button at the top of the window. In the resulting window, you
should see a line with the "disk identifier". On the MacBook Air it's
"disk2", on the Mac Pro it's "disk5". Note that you want the disk identifier
of the card, not the name of the volume (partition) on the card, which is
generally something like disk2s1. If you get a volume device name, you need
to click on the parent item, which is typically the name of the card reader,
then choose Info.

- Run the Terminal app.

- cd to the directory with the file decoded from the zip. If you haven't
used the command line before and have no idea what I'm talking about, you
can just move the SrsRaspPiDemo2.img file to your home folder, the folder
the OS creates with your login name and holds all of your other folders,
like Documents and Downloads.

- Finally, we're going the use the dd command to to blast the image onto the
card. A note of caution: this lets you blast data directly onto a drive,
instantly destroying any data already there. That's a good thing, it's what
we want to do, BUT if you get the wrong BSD name or do something stupid like
swap the arguments, you can completely trash your valuable data. If you've
done the steps above correctly, type the command below, replacing diskX with
the disk identifier you found in the step above.

dd if=SrsRaspPiDemo2.img of=/dev/diskX

The "if" argument means "input file" and "of" means "output file" so the
command above says input the disk image file and output to the card reader.

The only feedback while dd is doing its thing is a blinking caret in the
terminal window. This takes a while, so don't give up. On my late 2010
MacBook Air, the card reader writes at about 1.1 MB/second, which means a
little over 2 hours to copy the nearly 8 GB disk image.