Since the original tutorial was written a few years ago a lot has changed in the land of the Raspberry PI imager and hence I tought it was urgently needed to update that tutorial.
At the time of writing this the latest version of the Raspberry Pi Imager is V1.8.4, which now includes options for the Raspberry Pi 5, and is available from the raspberry pi website.
After downloading and installing the software the first thing that stands out is that it now includes an additional button to chose the flavor of your raspberry pi. For the purpous of this tutorial we’ll use the RPI4, but the procedure should be the same for all the raspberry pi flavours.
On to the OS you like, here for the purpous of the tutorial we’ll use the 64bit lite version.
In most cases chossing your devices is selecting the only available option there is. Not in my case so lets dig a little deeper into this so you know what it’s like.
As you can see there are 2 storage drives detected. One shouldn’t not see the first one unless you have multiple usb drives or sd cards plugged in to it. in my case its a virtual disk, or actually a RAID1 array.
So in this case select the 16GB storage device, as this is the SD card.
When you select Next you’ll get a new popup asking you if you want to customize your OS before burning it on the SD card.
You could select change, or just ignore it. that is up to you.
If you selected Change, you’ll be asked to input following data:
– Hostname
– Username and Password
– Wifi settings,
– language region
Note that you can select wheter you want to change it or not.
Before continuing i do suggest you enable SSH under services.
Press Save, and Yes to start the burning process.
After this you’ll get a warning if you are sure you wish to burn the os to the selected disk. Ofcourse we press yes if you selected the correct disk. otherwire go back and change it.
Depending on the quality of the SD card, and how long you’ve had it in use before this process can take 5 minit or 30 minits. it usually doesn’t take that long.
After completion you’ll get the message that you can remove the SD card from your reader.
Congratulations, you now should have a working version of the raspberry pi os on your SD card ready for you to use.
Please do follow one of our other tutorials in how to harden your newly installed OS.