Raspberry - Raspbian - First steps

Unpack the Raspberry Pi, hook it up to a keyboard, monitor and network. Get a MicroSD card with at least 8 GB size, and a card reader which you can use to write the image to the card.

Download the Raspbian image (as example from the raspberry.org website).

Verify the image checksum:

sha256sum /tmp/2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.zip 
a50237c2f718bd8d806b96df5b9d2174ce8b789eda1f03434ed2213bbca6c6ff  /tmp/2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.zip

Write the image to the MicroSD card:

unzip -p /tmp/2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.zip | dd of=/dev/sdc conv=fsync bs=4M status=progress

Plug the SD-card into the Raspberry and power it on. Initial login credentials are pi / raspberry. Change the password!

Find out the IP-address of the newly booted system:

/sbin/ifconfig

Enable ssh access:

systemctl enable ssh.service && systemctl start ssh.service

Run OS upgrades:

apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade && apt-get clean

Consider changing a few things in order to not wear out the SD-card too much.

Install Python for Ansible:

apt-get install -y python