Format SD Card for Raspberry Pi

Having bought the Raspberry Pi we need to take some first steps on the SD Card using a computer … Basically we want to move the operating system to the memory card so that the Raspberry pi can boot

The following procedure was done on openSUSE 12.X and is exactly the same for all Linux distributions.

First of all, it is good that the SD card we are going to use is over 2GB …

First we download the corresponding distribution as those proposed on the official website
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

Once our file is downloaded we open the terminal and move to the folder where our file was downloaded (.zip)

Step 1. We are looking for our file to see that it has actually been downloaded to our folder
alexandros @ alexandros: ~ / Downloads $ find 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.zip2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.zip

Step 2. Unzip our file
alexandros @ alexandros: ~ / Downloads $ unzip 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.zip
Archive: 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.zip
inflating: 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img

Step 3. Unzipping results in the .img file
alexandros @ alexandros: ~ / Downloads $ find 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian *
2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img
2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.zip

Step 4. We give the following command to see the features of our hard drives and SD Card
alexandros @ alexandros: ~ / Downloads $ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for alexandros:

Disk / dev / mmcblk0: 15.9 GB, 15931539456 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors / track, 486192 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes
Sector size (logical / physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I / O size (minimum / optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00014d34

Device Boot        Start        End      Blocks        Id System
/ dev / mmcblk0p1            129      1920          57344  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 1           does not end on cylinder boundary.
/ dev / mmcblk0p2         1921 486192    15496704     83 Linux

Step 5. Transfer the .img to the SD Card
alexandros @ alexandros: ~ / Downloads $ sudo dd bs = 1M if = 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of = / dev / mmcblk0
1850 + 0 records in
1850 + 0 records out
1939865600 bytes (1.9 GB) copied, 431.969 s, 4.5 MB / s
alexandros @ alexandros: ~ / Downloads $

The default username and password for this distribution are:
Default login
Username: pi
Password: raspberry
Download openSUSE for Raspberry pi.

See here the official guide to format the SD Card from windows.