The standard boot configuration of the Raspberry pi can lead to some characters not working properly on US keyboards. In particular, the shift-number characters like !,~,# can not be where you expect them. The easiest way to fix this is to edit the nano /etc/default/keyboard file. The following should fix things for you.
$ sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard
Then on the line for XKBLAYOUT change it to:
XKBLAYOUT=”us”
That should make your pi work properly with most US keyboards.
It is very easy to corrupt the SD card and your operating system on your Raspberry Pi. It is important to always properly shut down the raspberry pi. Never just remove power, always shutdown first. Never remove the SD card while the pi is booted or while it is powered. To remove the SD card, first shutdown the pi, then take the power off, then remove the card. Similarly, never plug the card in while the pi is powered.
The simplest way to shutdown the pi is with the command:
$ sudo halt
Instead, if you want to shutdown and then reboot, you can use:
$ sudo reboot
These two commands will take care of things most of the time. If for some reason sudo halt does not work, you can try the following:
$ sudo shutdown -h now
That will pretty much always work.
In this lesson we explore a new and very powerful Linux command . . . the sort command. The sort command allows you to sort a file alphabetically, numerically or by calendar month. We show how to sort forward or backward, and how to send the sorted list either to a file or to the terminal window. This quick video will get you up to speed on sorting in Linux.
Windows is pretty forgiving in how you name your files and folders. In Linux, you must remember that things are case sensitive, and you want to avoid using spaces in your file names and folder names. Also remember, that in linux folders are also called directories. This video shows three suitable naming conventions in Linux that allow the files names to be both descriptive and readable.
As we learn more about the Raspberry Pi, we will get to the point that we will need to write programs. We have learned how to write python programs in our earlier tutorial series on the Arduino. Good news is that we can apply what we learned there to the Raspberry Pi. But, we will first have to learn how to create and edit text files. The text editor we will use on the Raspberry Pi is called “nano”. We will learn how to use nano by creating and editing simple text files. Also in this lesson we learn how to make new directories in Linux using the mkdir command. We also learn that we can view a file without opening it by using the “cat” command.
Watch the video above for all this information. These concepts are best taught and learned by watching and doing. So, watch the video and do the commands along with me. You will be an expert in no time!