How to connect a Raspberry Pi to the Internet:
To connect to the Internet I just plugged in an ethernet cable and then, after logging in and typing "startx" to log into the Graphical User Interface, clicked on the Midori icon. Midori is the web browser that came pre-loaded on the SD card that I bought from Mod my Pi. I typed "Google" in the search box and Google came up in a small window.How to change the screen resolution:
The resolution was funny (i.e. the picture in Google, and in the pre-loaded Python Reversi-like game "Flippy," was too big for the screen on my Hitachi TV using an HDMI connection) so, using the Pi itself in the command line view, I edited the config.txt file a bit being very careful and following the instructions. I removed the hash key before the relevant section (apparently known as 'uncommenting') changing the overscan settings to 20, 12, 10 and 10. I checked in "Flippy" and the screen resolution was much improved.: I could see all the board on my screen. [actually now this problem has returned. There is a lot about editing the config.txt for Raspberry pi here. But apart from the mouse sometimes working and sometimes not working (which may have just been a loose connection) nothing I did seemed to make much difference here. Maybe it was only working briefly because I was using an HDMI cable and a different monitor.]Sound problem (not yet solved:)
I tried following some instructions to make sound work on my TV using the HDMI cable and input but no such luck so far. I have the sneaky feeling that one ought to have a sound card or download some drivers but none of the tutorials say that: they all imply it comes downloaded in Wheezy (Do I have Debian Wheezy or Squeeze, I ask myself? And how can I tell? I'm fairly sure I have Wheezy since that is what ModmyPi seem to claim to be supplying on their other SD cards and I when I tried to download the drivers an error message suggested they were already installed.) In theory sound should just work after, at most, a few tweaks in the config file. At least now I am connected to the internet I can download drivers if I need to.How to navigate files and directories in the GUI or the Unix views:
To look around and see what programs and files you have you can click in the bottom left hand corner of the screen as in Windows and a menu pops up. Under "Programming" you can see what programs your computer has for programming, under "files" you can see the directories and files (like in "My computer" in Windows.)If you want to do this in the Unix view (no need yet though) Simon the Pieman has posted some good instructions. These include
Useful commands:
cd change directory
ls for listing files
ls -l for detailed listing of files
cat to display files
more to page through lists/files
less to page through lists/files
history to see what you have done
[up arrow] to go back through your history
[down arrow] to go forward through your history
[tab] to automatically expand a file or directory name
!{number} to run a historic command number {number}ls for listing files
pwd print working directory
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