New toy on the desk: Raspberry PI zero W and Raspberry Camera

Just before Christmas I have been to an electronics and surplus fair where I bought myself, among other things, a new Raspberry family “thing”. I started with a vague idea of building my very own “hackable” camera. I didn't have, and still don't, have a definitive idea of how it must be or what to do with it ... just it must be hackable i.e. I must be able to reprogram it once I need it for something else. I so bought a Raspberry Pi Zero kit, including the official withe-red case heath sink and male pin strip, and a 8 M pixel Pi Camera.

Headless installation

I'm getting quite used to prepare and install Raspberry Pi images, it's the fourth time, almost always headless. Plenty of tutorials can be found on the Internet by the way. This time is not very different apart from just one detail: I had to configure the Raspberry to connect to WIFI network from the very beginning.

So after copying the latest Raspbian image on the micro-SD card withe the usual “dd” command

sudo dd if=2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/sdd

I configured Raspbian to enable SSH by default

sudo touch /media/maxx/boot/ssh

Then on the same root directory I created a “wpa_supplicant” WIFI configuration file

sudo vim.tiny /media/maxx/boot/wpa_supplicant.conf

Where I wrote down my wireless network configuration

country=ITctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdevupdate_config=1
network={ssid="WIFI"psk="secret"}

At last I powered the Raspberry Pi and scanned the WIFI network for the new entry computer.

I connected trough SSH and I went, of course, trough the usual post-installation operations like changing the Pi user password and expanding the file system to the full micro-SD extent.

Pi Camera installation

Once I verified the Raspberry was correctly working I powered it back down and connected the Pi Camera using the small flat cable also included in the Pi-Zero kit I bought.

KODI on RetroPie (and Raspberry Pi)

I’m not what you’d call a hard gamer ... probably I’m not a gamer at all. So after a little playing with RetroPie, and the few ROM files I managed to find, I continued with experimenting with available RetroPie “ports”.

RetroPie ports are a plug-in system that usually allow you to add open source games or additional emulation engine to RetroPie interface. The “KODI” port instead allow you to install and start from RetroPie interface a full featured media manager giving your retro-computing machine an effective “double life”.

KODI Media Manager

KODI, previously known as XBMC is a media manager software available for various Linux flavours. On the Raspberry it's available both as installation package and as stand alone distribution. KODI is of course capable of playing music and video both stored locally on a remote DLNA source. In addition KODI allows installing a great variety of add-on modules to display, for example, YouTube videos or whether news.

Installing KODI “port”

KODI can be installed and integrated with RetroPie interface from RetroPie set-up script.

sudo RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh

I selected the “Manage packages” menu, then the “Optional packages” one at last I selected “KODI” package in packages list.

Then the installation script started and I only hat to patiently wait its conclusion.

Installing RetroPie (on the Raspberry Pi B+)

Just after I installed the Raspberry Pi 3 as home server I promised myself I would have destined the old board to more “experimental” experiences. As soon as I got some fee time I so decided to explore Raspberry gaming capabilities. I'm far from being a gamer today but I spent some time playing computer games when I was younger, during the “Commodore Amiga age”.

RetroPie

RetroPie is a Raspberry Pi distribution, based on Raspbian, specialised on making the Raspberry a full featured gaming machine. RetroPie image is provided with a great variety of emulation software, a graphics user interface, gaming control support and a configuration program to setup most of its options without the need of keyboard and mouse. Among its features RetroPie allows to download and install optional modules supporting things like media server software and open source games.

Parts list

Before starting to install I collected the required hardware: The Raspberry Pi, of course, a 8GB USB disk I had available, a wireless USB adapter I already used with the Raspberry and a cheap wireless keyboard I bought during a surplus fair. Last but not least by bedroom TV was going to be used as monitor. The wireless keyboard has been the only thing I bought with this project in mind.

Setting-up the Raspberry PI 3 as a home server

It has been some time since last time I wrote, unfortunately my job stole most of my limited free time keeping me from experimenting and so posting about it. At last I managed to collect enough free time to complete Raspberry PI 3 installation and replace the older model I was using as home server.

Just like before? Not exactly

When I started configuring and installing the Raspberry PI 3 I was hoping it would have been a simple repetition of operation I already performed on the older Raspberry. Most of it has been that way but in some cases I experienced some relevant difference.

Configuring a static IP address

I've been configuring static IP address on Linux since I installed my first Pentium III based Linux, so I really didn't expect any problem here. Once I configured “/etc/networking/interfaces file” I instead noticed the Raspberry was visible on the network with two different addresses. After some searching on the Internet I discovered it's because of a different way DACP client works on latest Raspbian release. The problem can be solved in two ways: first is configuring DHCP client in order to let it set a static address on network interface alternatively it's possible disable DHCP client for one or more network interface. I chose the latter, at the end, since the Raspberry is going to be a DHCP server so there is no deal in keeping DHCP client active. I disabled DHCP client from assigning address to both wired and wireless network interface by adding the following line to “/etc/dhcpcd.conf” configuration file.

denyinterfaces wlan0 eth0

DHCP server and wireless access point

Like I did on my first Raspberry server I configured the new one to work as DHCP server and a wireless access point. It seem there are no relevant changes since first time I did it, I simply had to follow my own instructions.

Installing applications

Installing apt-ger based applications like LAMP sever and MiniDLNA server has been a quite easy task, while to install other applications like RPI-Monitor I had to look for the updated download link on the Internet. I also installed the updated version of SFPG picture gallery, it works but picures thumbnails don't show. I'll look for a solution later.

Power supply and cables

Once I had the Raspberry PI 3 installed and configured on my desktop I pit it in place of the old one and … nothing was working. It took me some time of testing and pinging before I noticed the board power led wasn't properly lighted-up. The phone/tablet charger I used to supply the old Raspberry wasn't up to the Raspberry PI 3 power requirement. I replaced the power supply with the one I used for desktop test but it wasn't enough to make the Raspberry PI 3 working, I had to replace micro-USB power cable with a shorter one in order to have it working, I think it's better I'll buy a dedicated Raspberry PI 3 power supply soon.

New toy on the desk: Raspberry PI 3

Just before Christmas I've been to a “traditional” electronics and surplus fair, here in Genoa, and bought myself, among other things, a Raspberry PI 3 (version B) board. My goal is to replace, as home server, the Raspberry PI I bought two years ago in order to take advantage of the more computing power offered by the new board. Additionally the older board will be set free for more “experimental” experiments. As “accessories” to my new Raspberry board I bought a (clear) plastic case, a 16GB micro SD card and en external 2.5'' USB hard disk.

Installation and first tests

I first downloaded latest Raspbian release, the “Lite” version since I'm going to use it as a headless server. Like I did last time I copied the disk image on the 16GB SD card using the “dd” command.

sudo dd if=2016-11-25-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/sdd

All worked fine but I had to fix a couple of things. The image I copied at the first tentative didn't boot, I had to remove all memory card partitions using Gparted then repeat the copy process. The disk copied after the second tentative works fine, I don't know if problem was because a failure in the first copy or because of how the card was pre-formatted.

The latest Raspbian release has SSH demon disabled by default to enable it I had just to add an empty “ssh” named file on the memory card root folder.

touch /media/maxx/boot/ssh

Ubuntu 15.10 “Wily Werewolf” on Veriton S661 (full install)

After almost one year I managed, just in these days, to change my Internet provider and have back my land-line ADSL connection. First things first, I started with updating my home desktop computer (the Acer Veriton S661) I left mostly unattended during this period since my mobile Internet contract was barely enough for daily connectivity needs. Unfortunately it seems my computer has been left too much without upgrading and the update process halted signaling many “404” errors while accessing to different repository locations. May be I could find another solution to upgrade my system but, since I usually keep the “/home/” folder on a separate partition, I decided to go for a complete re-installation of latest Ubuntu-Gnome release.

The installation process

I proceeded with installing as usual, prepared a USB disk with Ubuntu's tool, booted from it and went on with installing. On order to maintain my separate home partition I selected the custom “Something else” installation type

Installed Xubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet on the EEEPC

After some testing of light-weight desktop environments I decided, at last, for installing Xubuntu (Xfce flavored Ubuntu) on my good old EEEPC 900. Xubuntu choice came because Xfce desktop environment behaved well, during my tests, working smoothly on the resource-poor EEEPC while being still able to render a modern enough user interface. Last but not least I've been using for years Xubuntu on my old desktop Sempron 2400 without problems.

Before installing

Before starting with installation procedure I had to do some preliminary operation. First has been, of course, backing-up my home folder into an external USB disk (hosting all my backup since I removed original Xandros installation). Then I executed Ubuntu's disk analysis tool in order to have a hint about how to partition the new installation disks. Until now, in fact, I kept the EEEPC900 4GB on-board disk for a minimal Windows XP installation (when I bought it the EEEPC was my fastest computer) but time has come to get rid of it. So a fair distribution of disk usage among the two netbook disks is going to be important.

The disk analysis showed how my disk usage was almost evenly split between the “home” and the “usr” folder (where most of application are installed) while the rest of system folder are well less of the 4GB limit.

Java JDK 8 and Netbeans 8 on the EEEPC

With the recent release of the long awaited Java 8 Oracle also released the latest version of its development environment Netbeans. JDK8 and Netbeans have been made available as single updates or together in a bundled package. Since I wasn't fully satisfied from my recent upgrade to Netbeans 7.4 I was more than willing to upgrade.

Installation

The bundled package is in the form of the usual self-executable file Oracle provides to distribute Netbeans installations, let me say the installation process couldn't be easier.

I executed the installation file from shell …

chmod +x jdk-8-nb-8-linux-i586.sh

sudo ./jdk-8-nb-8-linux-i586.sh

the installation wizard started

Back to Ubuntu : installed Ubuntu Gnome 13.04 on the EEEPC

I've been using Mint 12 on the EEEPC since February 2012. it worked fine all this time but, what I really missed was the ability to upgrade the distribution to a new release without the need of a full installation. After the recent positive test I eventually decided to install on my net-book Ubuntu Gnome 13.04.

Installation

As usual the installation process begun by backing-up my home folder and preparing a bootable USB disk. I booted the EEEPC from the USB disk and started the installation program. The installation sequence was definitively the same I encountered while installing Ubuntu. Like then, the only interesting part has been the disk partitioning part. I use the 4GB SSD EEEPC disk as boot disk for windows (I like to play some old games every now and then) so I must be sure the installation goes all on the 16GB secondary SSD.

I selected the “Something else” custom partitioning option that brings to the partition editor.

Unfortunately the disk partitioning tool is bigger than the EEEPC 900 screen: here is the full window (I got it with the 'alt-print screen' screen-shot shortcut)

Ubuntu 13.04 on Veriton S661 (Full Install)

It's time of major upgrades for my desktop computer: I just bought a graphics card and a bigger hard-drive. Knowing I was going to hardware-upgrade kept me from upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 as soon as it's been made available. I was going soon to have to install it on the new drive.

To be precise I didn't exactly put the new drive on my desktop computer: I bought a new 1TB hard-drive I put on my NAS. It's the 500GB drive I previously used in the NAS the one I placed in the desktop.

So, after copying all the data to the new drive I booted from a USB drive and I begun to install.

Partitioning the disk

I've never been a many-partitions advocate but, with a 500GB disk, some partitioning is needed. I decided to partition the disk with GParted before starting the installation. I split the disk in two partitions of about a one-to-four ratio plus a little 5GB partition to be used as swap.

since I use my desktop computer mostly for home video and slide-shows editing the bigger partition will be destined to be mounted as /home folder.

Mint me too!

Upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Mint 12

 

At last I decided to upgrade my EEEPC 900! The Ubuntu installation I was still using on it (10.04 LTS Netbook edition) was getting old so, after many live testing, and some “Test Drive” post I settled for installing Linux Mint 12 “Lisa”.

Why Mint?

If you read my post about Linux Mint test you'll have certainly noticed that it impressed me quite well. I mostly liked the Mint approach to user interface both open to innovation and respectful of old users. But what eventually led me towards a Gnome3 based distribution has been discovering, thanks mainly to Linux Mint, how this desktop environment can be expanded. I discovered, in fact that Gnome3 can be expanded using Javascript programming. Many extension are being developed and can be downloaded and installed from a Gnome3 page. Plenty of documentation and examples are available. Gnome3 guys didn't give of flexibility that had been Gnome2 characteristic, they just left it well hidden.

Installation

I prepared the installation, like usual, by writing a bootable SD card with Ubuntu's start-up disk tool. I then booted the EEEPC and started the installation program.

Edupup : Education-tailored Puppy Linux

I decided, at last, what to do with that old HP Omnibook I recently got. I'm going to stuff it with educational software, I have a nephew or two who are of the right age to learn while having some fun even with a such old computer.

Edupup

I had Puppy Linux already installed on the Omnibook but, since I had found a education-tailored distribution on this Italian LUG page, I decided to install it over the (still unused) previous installation. The distribution is a bit old, last update is in 2010, but is not a vital detail since my computer is far more old than the distribution. Speaking of specialized versus general purpose distributions I often prefer to start with a general purpose one then install the software I need. In this case I instead I decided for installing a specialized one since I'm not fully used to Puppy installation mechanism and having a distribution with some software already installed could save me some time.

Installation

Puppy Linux installation is simple but sometime it might result tricky. My thirst Installation tentative concluded without error messages but it refused to start in any way (even by booting from Edupup CD) I suppose that it was because the previous Puppy installation on the same disk that the installation wizard did not clear. I formatted the disk and then repeated the installation, everything went eventually fine.

Some post-upgrade activities on the EEEPC

After the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 I spent some time installing some of the applications I had in the previous installation and doing some little system tuning.

• Enabled the bash “smart” completion function that helps completing not only file names but also commands options: I edited the “bash.bashrc” file ...

sudo gedit /etc/bash.bashrc

and removed comments from the following lines (more details here)

# enable bash completion in interactive shells

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then

. /etc/bash_completion

fi

• Installed Fbreader: I installed it using “Ubuntu software center” then I copied files “books.xml” and “config.xml” from the previous installation backup in the ".FBReader" folder in order to keep my configuration and books list.

• Installed TrueCrypt: I just downloaded the last version from here and installed it following the same process I already used.

• Installed Java and NetBeans: Ubuntu 9.10 repositories are quite up-to-date so I first installed Java JDK (1.6.0_15) using apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

then I simply installed Netbeans (6.7.1) from the software center

Installed Ubuntu 9.10 (NBR) on EEEPC 900

The upgrades season continues … after upgrading my desktop I decided to give a try to the lastly released Ubuntu version also on the EEEPC. I so downloaded, using bittorrent, Ubuntu 9.10 NBR ISO image from here and prepared a bootable SD card using the utility provided in Ubuntu desktop. I then started the EEEPC from the SD card reader and had my first test run on the system.

Installed Ubuntu 9.04 on Sempron 2400

I really couldn't resist not to try the recently released Ubuntu version.  I so cleared an almost forgotten 20GB partition on my desktop computer (Sempron 2400) and I started installing Ubuntu 9.04.
Ubuntu, Kubuntu or ...
I'm an eternal undecided between Gnome or KDE (and XFCE isn't bad too) but, since I'm using EEEBuntu on the EEEPC, I got more used to Gnome and this leaded me into installing Ubuntu.
Downloading
I downloaded the ISO image of Ubuntu CD from the torrent download page. I usually prefer downloading big files using TorrentFlux (on my PIII 550 server). I so started the download in the evening of the 23rd and went to bed. The next morning the download was completed.