Raspberry Pi For Dummies. Sean McManus

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      Raspberry Pi Foundation

      FIGURE 4-11: The Add/Remove Software menu.

The main pane shows you the packages, with a scroll bar on the right that you can use to see the full list. Those that are already checked (or ticked) and shown in bold are already installed on your Raspberry Pi. You can click a package to see its description below. To select a package for installation, tick the box beside it. To remove it, untick it.

      When you’ve finished choosing your software, click the OK button to install and remove the applications. You will be prompted to enter your password (which is raspberry if you haven’t changed it). It can take some time to download and install the software, so it’s a good idea to choose a few applications and leave them to install in one batch while you do something else.

      The menu ensures that any applications that your chosen application requires also get installed. When I installed Brain Party (see Chapter 19), for example, the menu automatically installed its separate data package for me.

Backing Up Your Data

      If you want to back up your files, you can easily copy them to a USB key using File Manager as described earlier in this chapter, or using shell commands. (See Chapter 5 on file copying, and the Appendix for more on mounting external storage devices.) If you’ve got a lot of files on the MicroSD card, though, and you’ve spent time customizing it with your preferred settings and software, you might prefer to make a backup copy of the entire card. There’s an application to do this, called SD Card Copier, which you can find in the Accessories section of the Applications menu.

      To use SD Card Copier effectively, you need a USB MicroSD card reader, which will enable you to read and write additional MicroSD cards from your Raspberry Pi, using a device plugged into one of the USB ports. If you don’t have a MicroSD card reader, you can use the application to back up to a USB flash drive; you would need a card reader, though, to restore the backup to a MicroSD card so that you can use it in your Raspberry Pi.

The application is shown in Figure 4-12. It has two menus, where you choose which device to copy from and which device to copy to. If you’re not sure which MicroSD card contains your operating system (the one the Pi is currently using), check the Copy To Device menu: It won’t be listed there, because you can’t use this application to write to the card the Raspberry Pi is using for its operating system.