Raspberry Pi OS - First Steps

A long time ago I wrote down the first steps I usually do when installing a new Raspberry Pi (or a Raspbian in that case). Now I’m installing a new system, with a 2025 Raspberry Pi OS. Time to update the notes.

Hardware requirements

The 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS “only” supports the “3B”, “3A+”, “3B+”, “4B”, “400”, “5”, “500”, “CM3”, “CM3+”, “CM4”, “CM4S”, “CM5” and the “Zero 2 W” hardware.

The 32-bit version is compatible with all released hardware version, even the older ones.

In my case I have a Raspberry 4B which I previously used for another project. This Pi has 4 GB RAM.

Download the image

Go to the Raspberry Pi OS Download page and download the base image.

Im my case I want the 64-bit version Raspberry Pi OS Lite. The current release is 2025-05-13, therefore the download file is: 2025-05-13-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img.xz.

Compare the checksum:

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sha256sum /tmp/2025-05-13-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img.xz
62d025b9bc7ca0e1facfec74ae56ac13978b6745c58177f081d39fbb8041ed45  /tmp/2025-05-13-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img.xz

This matches the checksum listed on the website.

Install the image on a SDcard

The old image in 2019 was using zip as compression format. The 2025 image is using the xz format. If you don’t have the xz utils installed, do that now:

Debian / Ubuntu:

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apt-get install -y xz-utils

Red Hat / Fedora / Rocky Linux:

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dnf install -y xz

openSUSE:

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zypper install -y xz

Arch:

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pacman -S core/xz

And it is time to write the image to the SDcard.

When you plug in the SDcard into your system, watch the logfile for details which device name the SDcard is using. Usually it starts with /dev/sd and then another letter. There might be partitions on the SDcard already, in this case you find at least one partition with a number, followed after the letter:

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sudo journalctl -f

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Jun 01 00:00:42 host kernel: usb 3-1.2.4.1.4: new high-speed USB device number 72 using xhci_hcd
Jun 01 00:00:43 host kernel: usb 3-1.2.4.1.4: Product: Mass Storage Device
Jun 01 00:00:43 host kernel: usb 3-1.2.4.1.4: Manufacturer: Generic
...
Jun 01 00:00:44 host kernel: sd 2:0:0:1: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
Jun 01 00:00:44 host kernel:  sdd: sdd1

Let’s say the SDcard is /dev/sdd, then the following commandline will unpack the image on the fly and write it to the card:

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xzcat /tmp/2025-05-13-raspios-bookworm-arm64-lite.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdd conv=fsync status=progress
2759844352 bytes (2,8 GB, 2,6 GiB) copied, 1166 s, 2,4 MB/s2759852032 bytes (2,8 GB, 2,6 GiB) copied, 1166,05 s, 2,4 MB/s

5390336+0 records in
5390336+0 records out
2759852032 bytes (2,8 GB, 2,6 GiB) copied, 1169,23 s, 2,4 MB/s

Start the new image

Plugging the Raspberry Pi on a keyboard and a monitor for now, so I can see what’s going on. Later it will go on a shelf.

On first startup you will be asked to create a user and set a password. This is unlike older versions which all had the same account and password.

Log in into the new system and find out the IP-address of the newly booted system:

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ip addr

Enable ssh access:

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sudo systemctl enable ssh.service
sudo systemctl start ssh.service

Run OS upgrades:

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

From here you are able to connect to the new system using ssh.

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