Setup a Raspberry Pi for the first time via a Mac

What you'll need;

1. Raspberry Pi (Rpi)
2. Mini USB power supply
3. HDMI cable
4. USB mouse and keyboard
5. 4 GB SD Card (flash)
6. A HDMI enabled monitor or display (or TV)
7. LAN cable

Plug all the items in - but not the power yet. First you need to setup the SD card with the bootable operating system.

Instructions can be found here; http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup Though they sound more complicated than it is.

1. Make sure you've given the SD Card a unique name
2. At the terminal type "df -h" and you'll be able to look up the device name in the format of /dev/diskxsx as you will see the volume name on the right hand side is what you assigned to the SD card in step one.
3. Download Raspbian "Wheezy" from here http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
4. Unzip it by double clicking the zip file that you just downloaded
5. Go into Disk Utility and unmount the partition of the SD Card, if it can't unmount it, eject it and then reconnect and do the un-mounting.
6. Type the following in the terminal "sudo dd if=path_of_your_image.img of=/dev/diskn bs=1m" the diskn should be consistent with what you got in step 2
7. It will ask for your password (the cursor won't scroll) press enter
8. This kicks off the process and it take's 1/2 - 1 hour or so to do the work - a long time, and it does not indicate any progress as it goes a long. You can check that something is happening by inspecting the dd process in active processes in system monitor - to convince yourself it's doing something (you'll see the processor utilisation varying).
9. Once that's complete then you are all set, just plug that in the Raspberry Pi and plug it into the power and you will be ready
10. On first boot it will give you a set of options to set, do so at your pleasure