6. Software

Now that you have your Pi connected to the internet, you should make sure it is completely up-to-date.

6.1. Removing packages

When you install a standard build of Raspbian, a lot of packages get installed for you. To make sure some of the larger packages aren’t wasting space on you SD card, you can remove them. We recommend you remove some of these. This can be done by running each of the following lines one-by-one on the command line.

sudo apt-get purge libreoffice wolfram-engine sonic-pi scratch
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove

You can reinstall any of these again later if you need them.

6.2. Operating System

Run the following line in the terminal to update your Pi. Note: this might take some time.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

6.3. Installing packages

Now the OS is updated, we need to install Python. To install Linux packages onto our Pi we use the command: sudo apt-get install <name_of_package> in the terminal. Each installation could take a few minutes.

  1. Run each of the following two lines to install C lib, needed by Python
sudo apt-get -y install libffi-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libssl-dev
  1. Installing Python, run each line one-by-one ensuring they complete
sudo apt-get -y install build-essential python-dev python-openssl
sudo apt-get -y install python-setuptools
sudo apt-get -y remove --purge python-pip
sudo apt-get -y install python-pip
sudo pip install --upgrade pip

Next, we’re going to take you through how to connect remotely to your Pi over a network (without needing to use a monitor keyboard and mouse with the Pi). However we strongly recommend you remember to take a backup of your SD card later. You can find a guide on how to do this later on: Backing up your SD card.