Blog Birthday Nine

One more year of lazy blogging is passed. Looking back to this year I must say I have no excuses for writing less than one post per month. Far more better looking forward, I'll try doing something more next year: I have two Raspberry PI installations, at the moment, which are attracting my interest more of the "flatter" desktop computing world. So I hope you'll find something more interesting on this blog next year. Stay tuned ...

Upgrading to Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark)

It's some time I don't upgrade my desktop computer, I must reckon I enjoyed the relative stability of using a LTS distribution and didn't fell the need of a twice-a-year system upgrade. Unfortunately my PC suffered of a system crash, probably because of some faulty hardware, just while updating with the result of corrupting the installed operating system beyond my capability of repairing it.

I so downloaded latest Ubuntu distribution release and started the good-old installation procedure.

No more Ubuntu-gnome long live to Ubuntu (Gnome)

I’ve been a Ubuntu-Gnome user for a long time, so I’ve been quite pleased to learn Canonical decided to stop Unity support and adopt Gnome-Shell as primary desktop manager. I so went for downloading latest Ubuntu ISO image. Once finished I prepared a bootable USB disk using Unetbootin tool, then I restarted my PC.

Installation

I started my computer from USB disk then selected the “Try Ubuntu ...” option instead of starting directly the installation program in order to collect screen-shots more easily.

After usual language and “third party” option selection I came to the installation type selection where I choose to upgrade my 16.04 installation.

Backing-up the Raspberry Pi 3

Recently I had to repeat installation of my Raspberry Pi 3 server. Probably because of some SD card corruption problem I started experiencing unexpected loss of active services, first GitLab then MiniDLNA, a and failures while trying reinstalling or reconfiguring them. I so downloaded latest Raspbian image and went with a complete installation. Not a big deal, since I’ve been following my own instructions on this blog but still a time consuming process.

Once the Raspberry server was operative again I started looking for a simple backup solution in the case something broke again by itself or, not unlikely, I broke something by myself.

I quickly found in the Internet this discussion page where, among other solutions, it was proposed a handy shell script to completely backup Raspberry SD Card. Following discussion links I landed on this GitHub page where the same script is available in its latest version.

Installation

Installing the script is just matter of downloading and unzipping it or, as alternative, cloning it with git command. I did choose the latter since I’m going to need git in future.

sudo apt-get install gitmkdir scriptcd script/git clone https://github.com/aweijnitz/pi_backup.git

configuring the script

The PI backup script is a fine example of shell programming, it needs only a couple of arrangements to fit the system where is installed.

First functions stopServices() and startServices must be edited by uncommenting commands to stop and start services running on the Raspberry. I added command to stop and start MiniDLNA service:

...sudo service minidlna stop...sudo service minidlna start...

Then I edited the backup path. In the same scrip section it’s possible to set the number of old backups to keep and if backed-up images must be compressed.

...# Setting up directoriesSUBDIR=backupMOUNTPOINT=/media/usbdiskDIR=$MOUNTPOINT/$SUBDIRRETENTIONPERIOD=1 # days to keep old backupsPOSTPROCESS=0 # 1 to use a postProcessSucess function after successfull backupGZIP=0 # whether to gzip the backup or not...

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.