Feeding your Pi

One of the first thing to do if you ordered that Pi without a pre-configured SD card is create one yourself. How hard could that be ..? Just download the 'Raspbian' operating system. and transfer it to a card. Now the download page tells you that 'Windows users should use Win32DiskImager' to transfer the OS to an SD card, but it looks like this software does not even see my SD card. Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem so I found that some people have successfully used the 'RoadKill DiskImage' software which indeed seems to work: That is to say it recognizes the card and writes to it.

Unfortunately: after placing the card in the Pi and power up, nothing happens. The OK LED does not blink and the laptop keeps telling me the Ethernet cable is unplugged so the Ethernet chip is probably not initialised.
Maybe Transcend 32GB is not the right type. So I tried the same procedure with a 4 GB Kingston microSD card. Same result.
Another search gets me to the eLinux wiki which again mentions the problem with Win32DiskImager but then suggests to use 'flashnul' software. Now this is Russian software, runs from the command line and contains some misspelled English texts but it seems to work fine. And indeed, after copying the OS to the 4GB card the Pi actually boots, the OK LED blinks and the Ethernet lights now all come up as well.