Raspberry Pi LESSON 1: First Boot and Configuring the Desktop, Panel, Menu and Preferences

hello guys this is paul mcquarter with toptechboy.com and we're here today with episode number one in our incredible new tutorial series where you're gonna learn how to make your raspberry pi sing and dance now why a class on the raspberry pi you ask well let me answer over the last couple of years the number one request that i've gotten from viewers and subscribers is to do a class on the raspberry pi so you asked and i listened number two as i look at the available educational resources out there what i find is most of the material is really project based what i didn't find is a really good methodical and systematic set of lessons that teach you how to use the raspberry pi now this is the situation if you go out and see someone do something really cool on the raspberry pi and you sort of copy their code and hook up their circuit and get your raspberry pi to do that same thing you really haven't learned anything that's not going to happen on this channel not on my watch no you are going to learn the raspberry pi so you can have your own ideas and you can pursue your own projects and your own inventions and your own creativity and you'll have the skills to implement those ideas on your raspberry pi okay so that's the second reason the third reason is as i look at the available material out there what i see is it seems like most of the things being done on the raspberry pi are things like retro gaming that is going in and trying to get your old favorite uh arcade games running on the raspberry pi or it has to do with like media streaming things where you might be having a media server in your home for videos or audio or things like that it seems like a lot of the work is around those two things where my real heart is is in circuits and sensors and actuators and getting in and digging down and working with those gpio pins like we did on the arduino and that's really what i want to do here because that is where i think the real magic happens okay so that is why we are doing these series of lessons and this class will really be about building your coding skills building your math skills building your engineering skills and also having a lot of fun so i really want to make this class fun i hope you guys have had fun in my other classes but we're going to be doing little projects along the way and those projects are going to be building your skills so what i am going to need you to do now is for yourself a nice tall glass of ice cold coffee that would be straight up black coffee poured over ice no sugar no sweeteners none needed and as you're pouring your coffee i want to give a shout out to our friends over at sun founder and sun founder is actually going to be sponsoring this series of lessons and we will be using their most excellent sun founder ultimate raspberry pi kit now why did i do this because i very much wanted this series of lessons to be around circuits and components and sensors and so i wanted to find a good kit that represented a large number of components so we can get a lot of learning done high quality components so that we're not frustrated with things that don't work and at the same time i wanted something that was affordable and i sort of zeroed in on this kit kind of got hooked up with the guys over there and they agreed to sponsor this series of videos and so i'm doing it because i think this is the best kit and then i've really enjoyed my my interactions with the guys over at sun founder but enough of this shameful advertising let's jump in and let's talk about what i am going to teach you today what my goal for today in today's class is get us to the point that we have first boot on the raspberry pi and then i want to go in and i want to help you get your desktop configured there's some things that i love about the raspberry pi and there's some things i don't like that much and one is i think that when you boot it it comes up in a really lame kind of low contrast hard to use desktop environment and i'm going to kind of show you what i do to crisp that up to make things more readable and particularly when i'm teaching something that will be easier for you to see what i'm doing and then also you'll get kind of familiar with how to customize the desktop for your particular taste or your particular applications it's not quite as straightforward as using a windows machine and there's a little bit more of sometimes kind of a hodgepodge feel to the way things work but i'll take you through in today's lesson and i'll get you comfortable with configuring your desktop now what i'll also say is what are the upcoming lessons so today we're going to go to first boot we're going to get our uh we're going to get our desktop configured next week what the lesson will be is i'm going to give you a quick one lesson overview of linux you will not become a linux expert but you will learn enough to make your way around the linux terminal because really as we get into really using the raspberry pi we got to get away from those windows and folders and kind of like little baby computer skills and we've got to know how to do what we need to do on the terminal and man working on the linux terminal is a lot of fun and you're going to learn how to how to find your way around linux on that terminal then in the third lesson lesson number three i'm going to give you an overview of python now i know a lot of you guys have taken my python class my ai class you've taken my python with arduino class and so you're probably familiar but just understand we got other people that are coming in fresh we don't want to leave them behind in this channel we don't leave any man or woman behind okay so we're going to kind of give enough python where people will be able to take this you guys that are experts tune in maybe you could be a resource to help people who are brand new maybe you can check the comments and see if there's questions you could jump in and be a help okay so that's the first three lessons then on the fourth lesson is when we will come in and actually start working with actually start working with the gpio pin so in lesson four is when you need to uh you need to be ready to start building the circuit so i've got a link down in the description it would be great if you guys went ahead and started putting your hardware together and so it would be a great time to go ahead and order the kit so that when we get to lesson number four we all have our gear put together okay speaking of gear besides the kit you're going to need a raspberry pi i hope most of you already have a raspberry pi the best thing would be if you have a raspberry pi 4. you don't need a raspberry pi 4 with a lot of memory just sort of like a standard raspberry pi 4 would be great most of the stuff that we're doing in these lessons should work on a raspberry pi 3 but a raspberry pi 3 or a raspberry pi 4 would work okay i will say that it's a little hard right now to find a raspberry pi and they're a little bit expensive right now so you might think about like looking on ebay or you might think about looking around seeing if you could buy a used one find a deal on one somewhere but what i've done in the description down below i put a link to kind of like the best starter package that i could find if you don't have a raspberry pi and there's a couple of things or you can just kind of find a used one and try to put it together yourself but there's a couple of things is on the four this is a usb type-c connector okay and so you need a power supply to power up your raspberry pi and then also make note that the raspberry pi 4 has one of those little tiny uh hdmi connectors and so you've got to have something that will take you from the small hdmi cable to the standard hdmi cable and the kit that i linked to does do that below but like i say by whatever means you can just find the best deal that you can on getting a raspberry pi then you're also going to need a sd card i think that this is where you want to buy a good sd card like get a samsung or a sandisk or something like that get a known brand and 32 gigabytes is a good size 32 gigabytes would be enough to do pretty much anything that you would want to do you don't need a crazy big one because if you get a crazy big one you're just kind of you're kind of wasting your money i think because you really don't need anything much bigger than a 32 maybe a 64. okay all right so that is the gear that you're going to need and i think i've spent enough time on all this introductory banter and i think it is time that we actually jump in and see if we can get some work done so i am going to need to come over here if i can can't find my mouse i'm going to need to come over here guys you can see why i'm a little bit confused here this is my studio let me get a let me get out of your way and you can see that i have one two three four five monitors and so sometimes it is a little bit hard to see where i'm going and what i'm doing now you can see the one two three and then over here is the four this one's black because that's the one that i'm going to be working on my raspberry pi with and then also this will be the raspberry pi screen that you will see as i'm typing and then i'll have a second screen up here that just i can see that maybe i can put notes on or whatever but you can see it's pretty easy for me to lose my mouse if i am not careful but there we have it and so now what i am going to need you to do is i'm going to need you to call up a browser and let's see this is the kit that i'm using here sun founder raspberry pi ultimate starter kit link down in the description make sure you guys go ahead and order that and now i need you to come over here and i need you to go to raspberry pi i need you to search on download raspberry pi installer the first result here is raspberry pi downloads software for the raspberry pi looks like a good place for us to go so i will click on that and let's see i'm going to go ahead i can make that full screen on this one and so let's hope that i have an internet connection here there it is boom and then i am on windows and so what i need to download is raspberry pi imager for windows you can also get it for the mac os or for the most excellent ubuntu but i am working on the raspberry pi imager for windows this is not the image itself it's not the operating system itself but it is the software that will allow you to download and burn the operating system on to your sd card so let's go ahead and get that i am getting the one for windows and then let's see here i think i do have to pull this up a little bit let's see if i can get you where you can see this and it is downloading okay there you can see it's the happy little icon down here shows that it's downloading i've got about 30 seconds left and so i'm not going to pause the video we can just sit and chat and sip coffee while while we're waiting on this thing to download it should just take a minute or two i've got a little bit of a slow internet connection today usually it's pretty good in the morning but right now it's not real good but uh it is almost done okay it looks like it is done and now i'm gonna just come here and just right here in the window i'm gonna click on it and with a little luck it should launch the installer and the installer is launched let me get it over here where you guys can see it and what do we want to do we want to install and then it says uh completing raspberry pi image or setup that's good run raspberry pi imager good and so i will say finish and boom there it is okay i downloaded this before so it might take you guys a few more seconds so don't panic if yours is doing more things than mine is maybe it's because i had installed this before that mine went so fast okay first thing that we are going to need to do is choose our operating system now what i'm going to need you to do is come down and say raspberry pi os other because i want the raspberry pi os full do you see that raspberry pi os full that installs some other software that is really kind of neat and kind of helpful and so it sort of gives you the full featured operating system and some of those things are kind of neat and with the 32 or 64 gigabyte card we have more uh we have more storage than what we really need so we're going to go ahead and choose that now it says choose the sd card well here's my sd card and then what i need to do is i need to put it into i need to put it into one of these little adapters here because i don't have a small a small sd card port right on my computer so i got to use the little adapter that allows me to plug it into a usb port and now i need to reach down here and try to kind of blindly see if i can plug it in okay so with that now i will come over here and i will say choose the sd card choose wisely make sure you don't like choose your c drive or something like that and erase everything but let's see it doesn't let me try that again there it is okay i had to plug it in twice sometimes the usb ports seem to get a little confused but let's come here now let's choose that and now what we're ready to do is we are ready to write it okay so i'm going to say right are you sure yes do double check don't just click yes make sure you're on the right one because this will erase everything now it says weighting zero percent guys depending on your internet connection and the speed of your computer and the speed of the usb port this might take from 15 30 minutes up to an hour or so and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to tell you to go ahead and pause i'm going to tell you to go ahead and pause the video all right and when yours is downloaded and ready then come back because i don't want to sit here and just shoot the breeze with you for an hour so let's go ahead and pause and then come back when your card is written okay your card should be written now and i have uh i have my card right here i have my card right here ready to go and so what we're going to do is we're going to come over here to this alternate view okay and i'm going to show you how to get this thing booted up okay mine is done and i will take the sd card and we are ready to try to boot this up okay so we're going to come and the first thing is is that when you slide your sd card into the raspberry pi i like to have absolutely nothing plugged into the pi like certainly you don't want to have the power cord plugged in because if you do likely you're going to corrupt the card when you put the card in so i have everything disconnected i like to have the hdmi disconnected as well because sometimes i think that you're getting some voltage back on the pipe from the hdmi i want this thing completely unpowered when i slide this in now the hdmi slot itself is over on this side let me bring this down where you can see it a little better it's on this side and it's on the underside and so you need to get your sdi card you need to turn it with the pin side up do you see the gold pins those need to be up then you need to lift your pie and you need to find that slot and then you slide it you slide it into the slot now when you slide it into the slot you don't get a spring loaded effect it just slides in and slides out so don't don't expect any type of click or anything like that okay now the next thing i'm going to do is i am going to go ahead and plug the hdmi cable in and i i believe i believe that this is the hdmi one so that's what i'm going to be going to and then i'm going to come over here in the moment of truth we are gonna bring power to this thing and okay first good news is we're seeing some signs of life here with some happy little blinking lights we got the happy little splash screen there with all the different colors now we're hoping to see like a cursor yep we're seeing the cursor up there that is encouraging and then we saw a few splash screens again and what we're hoping is very shortly to see the desktop pop up now sometimes the first time you boot boom look at that okay sometimes the first time you boot it can take a little longer it seems like sometimes it tries to figure things out but you can see that for me it went relatively fast all right so now i think probably i'd better get further out of your way because it seems i think maybe i can just move this let's see okay now also i have a mouse and a keyboard and because i don't like a whole lot of cables i am using this little usb dongle here and going to a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard and that way i don't have to manage a bunch of uh a bunch of cables here and also you've got kind of just four usb cables or four usb ports and so by using this i get both mouse and keyboard with just using up one of the usb ports okay now we're going to get this thing configured so this says welcome to the raspberry pi desktop before you start there are a few things you need to set up go ahead and press next to get started okay i am going to set mine up for the united states even though i am not in the united states i set it up as that because that's what kind of keyboard and all that so i'll just say united states i want american english and then time zone attack will you guys set your time zone mine isn't on here i'll worry about fixing that later but i do want u.s english language and i want u.s keyboard and if you're not in like the us like you're if you're in uk you might think about not clicking that all right and so that all looks good we're going to click next and then we're going to have a sip of coffee as this sits in weights [Music] setting location all right even though it's the wrong location i'll fix all that later and basically that just makes sure your clock is right okay it's asking me for a password guys you do need to have a password on your raspberry pi because if it's hooked to your home network and you leave it unsecured you're kind of leaving a door open for someone to get onto your system and then once they're on your system they can do various nefarious things so you really do want to have a good password on anything you hook to the network hopefully you can't see what i'm typing in okay so let's see if that looks good okay now this is what you can see is if you look up here between the screen and the purple you can see that there is black around it and so my desktop is not filling up my screen and it's just it's asking me yes i need to click yes the screen shows a black border around the desktop and this should fix it by doing this and so when we look later it's probably going to make us reboot but when it comes back we should not have that black border so let's go ahead and click next okay and select your wi-fi network from the list hopefully it will find it okay i am manor house one you will be something else and now i need to put in [Music] hopefully i got that right okay it looks like it's going to be pretty happy these things usually go pretty fast okay now update software yes you want to update your software in a future lesson i'm going to show you how to do it later okay but right now i'm going to skip it because it can take some time and so i don't want to sit here waiting to update you can either update it now if you want to pause and wait or you can come in and do it later but we're going to go ahead and skip that for right now and then it says your raspberry pi is now set up and ready to go and to press restart to restart with the new settings so we're going to go ahead and do restart because we really hope this black border goes away by rebooting okay so we're gonna click that and now we are going to wait and we see the cursor and hopefully we'll see the splash screen here in a second boom the pretty colored splash screen and now we should shortly see the desktop [Music] and hopefully that black line is going to be gone this time [Music] boom got the desktop and look at that shazam that black border is gone so we are all good now i love the raspberry pi i hate the desktop configuration that they put on the pie and one of the things i particularly hate about it one of the things that i particularly hate about it is it's very low contrast and it's very confusing and it's kind of kludgy so i want to take a few minutes and show you how i configure my desktop now that doesn't mean you have to configure it exactly the way i do but it's going to be a quick tour around some of the most important settings and this is one of those things i found very confusing and trying to learn the pie there's not like a really good systematic way to go through it so let's go through it and let's get this thing configured better so i want you to come up to the happy little raspberry pi icon in the upper right and i want you to click on it and then i want you to come down to preferences and i want you to come over from preferences there it is come over from preferences and i want you to say main menu editor now why do we stop here because there's a lot of preferences that you can set but they're hidden so the first thing we want to do is add all of the preferences that we might want to use into our menu so we're going to edit the main menu okay now this comes up and you can see that this is sort of a picture of what pops up when you click the happy little raspberry pi icon now what i want you to come down is one of the things that pops up is preferences and then these are the things that come up under preferences and you see there is a lot of them but they're not all showing they're not all selected now what we really want to select is we have appearance that's good add remove that's good we really want display settings to show okay and then when we come down here to the bottom we really want theme and appearance settings because that'll allow us to try to [Music] boost the contrast and get the screen a little bit more readable and i think those are the main two that we want to add and so then we will come over here and we will click ok and now we should have the full featured menus of preferences now we're going to come up here and now we're actually going to go through the preferences and we don't need to adam remove software but we do want to adjust the appearance settings okay we want to adjust the appearance settings the first thing that i hate is this confusing background because as i'm trying to teach you or as i'm trying to see what's where this lovely scene of this sunset is just confusion so i want simplicity and so here where it says temple i'm going to click i did that too quickly let me show you here where it says temple i'm going to click on that and these are the options you can go through it but it's a lot of like photographs that are very confusing and so the simplest one to me is just this raspberry pi logo.png and that will give us something very simple so i'm going to say ok and then you can see that's very goofy so you need to come here where it says fill screen with image and we're just going to say center image on screen and boom you see how that's just a lot cleaner crisper desktop i really like that now we're not going to play with these colors right here we're not going to play with these colors and then it's going to show the waist basket which you can see the waist back basket is showing and then also mounted discs so like if you added a disc like a usb drive it would pop up on your desktop as well so that is good now we're going to look at the menu bar now this is what this is what's confusing you see it's calling this thing up here the menu bar but then in other places it doesn't call it the menu bar it calls it the panel and this is kind of like sometimes a characteristic of open source team group people working together on things it's like these guys are calling it a panel and these guys are calling it a menu bar but but anyway the menu bar i want on the bottom and the reason i want it on the bottom is just on windows that's where it is and so since i'm used to it being on the bottom i want it on the bottom and when i did that you see boom it came down here to the bottom so kind of like all my systems have it in the same place you can put it where you would like it again we're not going to set the colors here we're going to set the colors when we work on a theme but again what you can see i don't like is you see this is like light gray text on dark gray background that is not easy to read folks that is not easy to read and so i don't like these low contrast settings okay the system looks okay and then on defaults now this is the crazy thing i want you guys to be able to read and again you see how you can't even read this thresher i want you guys to be able to see this really good and so i want to set the default for large screens and that's going to make all the text a little bit bigger but when i did that it just undid all the things that i did before and so it's kind of strange to get the bigger little bit more high contrast text it undid everything but we'll fix it again we'll come back over here and we will go from temple to raspberry pi logo and say open we'll then make it fit image on the screen we'll do that that's good and then we will come to the menu bar which is really the menu bar is really the panel and we will take that we'll put it on the bottom and then there we are kind of like where we want to be so we have gone through our first set of preferences if you don't like how i set it you can set it to how you would like it but now let's take a quick look at display settings uh 1980 by 1080 and 60 hertz that looks good so we will just save that configuration saved all right the next thing we're going to come to preferences we've done the display keyboard and mouse there's really nothing i'm going to change there at this point we've already done the main menu editor that we needed to do there the things that we needed to do and so we're going to come to raspberry pi configuration we're going to see what it is all about here okay you could change your password here you can do different things with how you boot or how you log on you can sort of do this the way that you would like to do it but this is something if you did that black screen thing like i did and then if it still had the black screen sometimes for some reason it doesn't fix it well this is where you would fix it you would want to make sure that you're not on enable you would want to make sure that you're on disable and if for some reason it didn't fix that when you clicked that box when we started this is where you would fix it if this is disabled you will get rid of that black screen at that black border okay this like later on when we're going to want to turn the camera on we would want to enable it if we want to remotely putty into our pi we would enable ssh here if we want to have a remote desktop we would start doing vnc if we're connecting by sbi or i2c which we will in later lessons we would want to enable them here we would have to enable the serial port if we wanted to do something like communicate with an arduino but you can see i think these are basically security settings and so when it boots everything's turned off and then if you want to turn things on you've got to deliberately turn them on here raspberry pi configuration and interfaces performance i am not really into overclocking things and so these things are probably pretty good here and then localization i could set my i could set my time zone here but i won't take the time to do that right now so we're just going to click ok now we're going to come down here and under preferences we've done raspberry pi configuration we've got recommended software we should be okay there and now screen configuration now what you can see is i have one screen i have one screen showing here because i have one hdmi cable plugged in if i plug my second monitor in then it would have both of them showing and then what you can do is you can move them around like if you had hdmi 2 on top you could put it on top or left and right and what that basically does is it gets your mouse working right in your cursor working right as you're moving from screen to screen but right now i'm just going to be using one screen in later lessons i'm going to call up that second screen but for right now we are using one screen so our screen looks good and now we're going to come over and on preferences i think we are all the way down to theme and appearance and this is where i'm going to try to get more contrast okay you can see that the theme that is default is pixflat and what i hate about it is i hate this this like light gray on a dark gray background i don't think that is readable i don't think that is enough contrast and so what i like to do is i like to start by going to mist and to me the miss seems to be a little bit more contrast and then we'll do some other things to give get even more contrast the problem is if i come to high contrast it's like black and white is there an in between something that is readable but not this ghoulish black and white thing but yeah the mist is the place that i would like to be you guys you can download themes from the internet that have got some really really nice desktop color combinations but i'm not going to take the time to do that i can get it working well enough just with what's there so we're going to go to mist and then on color i am not going to customize any of the colors here okay i'm just going to leave them with the theme colors on the icon theme i really like the gnome ones because that's a little bit more like a lot of the linux systems and so i'm going to use the gnome okay and then i i'm going to go ahead and apply those all right and then what you can see down here i've got the new i've got the new ones down here all right those are the gnome ones and then i'm going to go to mouse cursor those are i can either have those or those i think these are fine the window border i think is important because this is where i'm going to try to get a little more contrast and if you come down to these nightmare ones okay do you see how those are getting more contrast and i actually like the nightmare one which will give my active window sort of bright white over sort of a deep plum and i think that is both attractive and very readable okay i think that is attractive and very readable so we're going to go with that you see you could install a new theme here you can download them and you can install them but like i say we're just going to go with the themes that we have that we have here and now we are going to go to font and on the font uh nothing really here and then other nothing really nothing really anything here that we need to do either i think and so we can close at this point and i that is looking kind of strange let me go back something funny happened somewhere along the way preferences uh let's go to uh where was that appearance and settings okay fit image on the screen i think that was wrong what i want to do is simmer center it on the screen like that there it is okay so that was appearance and settings and now i think i have a nice clean desktop that i really like now let me see okay one more thing that we want to do i hate two clicks machines right why overwork yourself with two clicks where you can do it with one click so we're going to come down here to the little icon of the file cabinet that's your file manager and you pop up sort of a you know what would be a very familiar view of a folder view of your uh of your system and then we're going to come up to edit and we're going to go to preferences and up here at the top open files with a single click and then i am going to say close and then that makes me very happy okay that makes me very happy i've got a clean desktop i've got a readable font and the font sizes are large enough that i can read them and you guys can read them okay now let me try to kind of help you with one last thing in this uh in this lesson and that is something that i found that was probably the most confusing thing to get figured out was this screen this little panel bar down here and again it calls it the menu bar in one place and then in other places it calls it the panel and if you get this thing gooped up it's very hard to get it right so i want to kind of take you through it and explain it and explain where you can understand the terminology usually this whole thing all the way across and i need to go to a different view here i think i need to go to a different view where you can see the whole uh the whole desktop so say say goodbye to the live shot of the raspberry pi and then we're going to go to this shot and then i need to edit this very briefly i'm sorry i didn't have my windows already but i need to make sure that you can see the whole desktop okay i think that will work okay there now you can see the whole desktop and i will probably have to get further out of your way before this is over but okay this whole area down here is the panel if i right mouse click on it you can see that it talks about the taskbar it talks about the panel and it talks about panel settings so there's panels and taskbars and there there's also applets and there's also the menu so the whole thing is the panel from the left to the right down there that is the panel now this little icon here this is the menu and when you click on it you get all of your menu items okay all of your menu items and if we wanted to edit that we would go to preferences and then we would edit the menu okay and then you can see here are what we have this is what we have this is what's available to us like if we turned off universal access then over here you can see that universal access is grayed out it's not going to be on the menu let's just look at that we'll come over here and sure enough universal access has disappeared so that is how that works but again like i showed you earlier the other part of this that you need to understand is if we come into preferences and we go into menu you also can change or edit these sub-menus that are in the folder so to do that i would come over here and like preferences is a group of items and then everything in preferences shows up here and then i can turn those on or i can turn those off and so that is kind of what you need to know this is the panel this is the menu well then what is this this is the launcher okay and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually come in and kind of show you i think i need to edit this just a little bit more to make sure that it is absolutely readable for you okay and i'll kind of move it over here okay and now i will bring you to that view okay i think you'll be able to see it now okay so what we're going to do is we're going to play around with uh the we're going to play around with the panel now what's the task okay so taskbar settings what is the taskbar okay this uh this sort of controls what the taskbar looks like and the taskbar is this area here that is going to show the things that are actually running since we don't have anything running nothing shows here but let's say that i just clicked i clicked on the file cabinet and then you can see in the taskbar we have this icon show up now what's confusing to me and we'll fix this in a minute if this is the launcher the launcher is kind of right up against the taskbar so when you look at it it's hard to say what's part of the task bar and what is part of the launcher so i don't like that very much but what we're going to do is we're going to come in and we are going to right mouse click on the panel and we are going to say panel settings okay panel settings and the first thing is the geometry okay you can have it on the bottom you can have it on the top you can have it on the left or the right well it started out on the top and we moved it to the bottom and so we are going to leave it there now let me show you one of the goofy things that uh i don't know if they'll fix this at some point let's move it back to the top and then say close what happened when it moved it to the top it changed the icon why did it do that that's annoying so let's come back and say panel settings again and let's move it back to the bottom and look at that it is still that one and so what i'm going to do is i am going to come into menu settings okay so let me do that very carefully i right mouse click on the icon menu settings and where it says start here i go back to our pi rpi maybe you like that little squiggling thing but i like the little happy raspberry isn't that goofy maybe by the time you take this class maybe the the the version that you download they would have fixed this little glitch but that is that now let's come over let's go back to panel settings okay and so this is all more or less right you know you could adjust things if you want if you want to make it a little bit bigger a little bit smaller you could make the height bigger and the icon smaller whatever you want you could kind of adjust that if you wanted to but now let's come to appearance uh i like to use the system theme if i want to change this i want to change it in the theme not in the individual not in the individual element now this is where your real action happens and that is your panel applets and this is very very confusing but if you look at it this shows what you have as you come across what is the first thing you have is the menu that is the menu there okay that is the menu what is the next thing it is a spacer okay it is a spacer so this little globe which is your web browser and this are not absolutely against each other there's a very small spacer between them now what is the stretch business well if i turn on stretch it moves it out away and sort of makes it stretched out between the and i'm really going to have to get out of your way here so that you can see this and then i'll come back in a minute a little munchkin me okay so what that does is that stretches i make that spacer where it stretches and it puts a stretch between this group of icons and this group of icons okay and so that sort of stretches it out but we'll turn that off ah what did i do we'll turn off the stretch on the spacer now what is the next thing the next thing is the application launch bar and these things are things that you have an icon that allow you with one click to open a program so you don't have to go to the menu you can just open them with one click so what do we have for one click will the browser the file system and the terminal now what i don't like is you see like my panel preferences that is not my panel preferences is not part of the application launch bar it is part of the task bar it is part of the task bar okay and so it's very easy to get confused about what is the application launch bar and what is the taskbar so what i like to do is i like to put a stretch on this spacer here and then that task bar is over away from the launch bar and so now if i start a few things up what you can see is it's very clear these are the ones that are open and these are my choice of things that i could open okay let's say there's some things i really want here that i want just easy access and quick click to uh to access them and so here on my application launch bar right my application launch bar i want to add and what do i want to add let's look here and see if there is anything that is really good i'm trying to see if there's something uh okay i don't i don't see anything that i really have to have i was hoping there would be something cool there that wasn't uh that wasn't there but i don't i don't really see anything let's look at let's look at preferences on that launch bar and see if we're given any more things maybe we are given more things here so instead of adding adding is just adding kind of system things if we click on application launch bar and we go to preferences then i cannot stand being that munchkin there that's not quite as embarrassing okay so what we have done is we've gone to panel preferences we've clicked on application launch bar and now under preferences what i can add is i can add a program so if i look at programming i could come down here and i could select thawneypython okay and then i can over here add that and then close and then what do i have i have an icon in the application launchbar that i can click on and then with a little luck boom i come up and i've got kind of a python environment that i can work on and so that shows you how you can put your your most used programs here and you can get them with one click and so that is pretty good so again we are on panel applets here and then uh i think that looks good then we are going to go to advanced and there's nothing really that we need to do there and this all looks good and so i am going to come back now to panel applets because now we're again we sort of dove into we deep dove into the application launch bar but now we are going to continue going across so after the application launch bar there is a spacer we have told the spacer to stretch and therefore since the spacer is stretched this panel preference which is the taskbar is not against here if we took that stretch out it comes back and i don't like that are you seeing down at the bottom what happened i don't like that okay now similarly the taskbar and i'm going to have to go back to munchkin size i'm going to have to go back to munchkin size okay now watch this what you guys tell me what is going to happen if i take the spacer off the taskbar right this is the taskbar i'm going to take the spacer off and then all of a sudden it goes all the way over to kind of like these system things on the right well i don't want that either so i'm going to stretch it i could probably either stretch it there or i could stretch it yeah you could either stretch the spacer you could stretch the spacer or you could stretch the taskbar i think i'm going to stretch the spacer like that i think that looks good okay guys i don't know what the system tray is i can't figure it out there's nothing showing here maybe the system tray is something that only shows like if you have a system warning or something come up i look everywhere i don't know what the system tray is there's no settings i can only add it or remove it i can't change any settings so i have no idea what that system tray is now we come up the next thing is the ejector and the ejector would really be over here to the right but the reason you don't see it is i don't have anything plugged into eject and so it doesn't show up then there is a spacer and then comes the bluetooth which you can see here and then spacer and then the wireless and wired network which you can see okay and then the sound and then finally the clock okay so you now see how you can get the icons that you want down here and that you understand that sometimes this is called the menu but it is really the panel and then what you see is the menu is this thing that pops up like this then you have the application launch bar okay then over here you have the task bar and then you have a stretch and then you just have individual icons over here that are kind of like nice system things okay man i almost went insane because like i would lose this thing like let me let me show you something here i don't know let's say okay let me show you how this can be confusing in case you ever run into this you've seen it before so i am going to go to uh i'm going to go back to panel settings okay and let's just say that we came in here and on our panel applets i accidentally removed the menu okay the menu is gone now it might be you accidentally remove it and you might say well i'm not that stupid i'm not gonna accidentally remove it sometimes it disappears on its own and so therefore we would get it back how we would right mouse click and then we would come up to panel settings and then we would go to the panel applets that's like the individual little applications represented by an icon and what do i want to do i'm going to want to add something and what am i going to want to add i'm going to want to add the menu back okay the menu back and so i am going to add it okay and now i am going to look and i don't see it anywhere somebody tell me why i don't see it i see it here but i don't see it on the panel itself well you might say because it's all the way to the right and maybe somehow it has gotten off the right side of the screen so let's select it and let's move it up okay so we're going to move it all the way up okay and now move it up up up up up up up and moving it up is really moving it left okay and now let's say close and it's still not there it's still not there so if you come way over here like way way way to the left and you click it's there but you gotta come all the way to the left it's there but it doesn't have an icon okay so how do we fix that well we go back to preferences and let's see where would that be we're going to go back to the main menu editor and it is not a choice there it is uh let's look at menu settings okay menu settings and then it has a path for some reason here to a icon it can't find well how do we get the icon back rpi like we did earlier all right and then boom there it is guys just as i'm using the raspberry pi i can't tell you how frustrating it is when your little start icon disappears and then you can't find it and you have absolutely no way to know where it is or how to get it back the reason i did this is so when it happens to you and it will happen to you you'll know how to get your icon back and a lot of times it's really there the start menu is really there but you just can't see it okay guys man i hope you guys are having as much fun with this as i am this is going to be a great series of lessons we are going to have a lot of fun okay get your hardware ordered do the best you can to find your raspberry pi i've given you the link for the sun founder kit and then what we're going to do is again next week we are going to be looking at linux then we're going to be looking at python and then we're going to start playing with the gpio pins okay so you guys need to be getting all of your hardware together now so that when we get to these lessons you will have it okay i need to give you guys a homework assignment and what i want you to do for your homework is i want you to just go in and kind of get familiar with some of the software and some of the things that are on the raspberry pi so sort of play around with the start menu you can see there's some programming environments that you can play with there's some education software this is like a circuit simulator play around with these office applications this is a lot like microsoft office and so you've got things that are like very very similar to microsoft excel powerpoint uh microsoft word and if you're familiar with those programs you'll find that these things uh are very very similar and you should be comfortable with those you can see that we've got the chrome browser uh we've got an image viewer we've got some neat things in here so your homework for next week is to just go in and familiar familiarize yourself with the uh with the pod desktop okay so that is going to be your homework all right guys i am so excited about these this series of lessons i've got some really exciting stuff planned and again what this series of lessons is about is for you to learn not just for you to copy what i'm doing and so we're going to have a lot of homework we're going to be using math we're going to be using you know me teaching you how to think like an engineer and think like a coder and so this is really really going to be a class where you learn a lot and you have a lot of fun if you enjoyed this lesson make sure to give us a thumbs up and if you haven't already subscribe to the channel when you subscribe to the channel make sure that you ring that bell so that you get notifications of upcoming homework of upcoming lessons oh one more homework assignment almost forgot this leave a comment down below what you would like to see in this series of lessons okay because i am just now starting to build the lesson so now would be the time for you to let me know what you hope that i cover a lot of times like there's a lesson that i made three years ago or a class or a series of lessons that i made three years ago and then someone will leave a comment oh well you should do this well it's too late i already finished the lesson so now is the time for you to leave a comment about what you hope that i cover in this series of classes okay guys hope you're having fun with this i really look forward to next week having you guys tune in again paul mcquarter with toptechboy.com i will talk to you guys later [Music]

Channel: Paul McWhorter

Views: 151,014

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Id: 1WDagiA8fdU

Length: 54min 46sec (3286 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022