The Raspberry Pi

Introduction

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer powerful enough to run a full blown operating system like Linux. The 3^rd version of this machine features

• a quad core 1.2 GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64 bit ARM CPU

• 1 Gbytes of RAM

• Ethernet and wireless networks

• 4 USB 2 ports

• full size HDMI

• a camera port

• micro SD connector

• a 40 pin extended GPIO connector with GPIO input output pins, SPI and I2C bus interface

The Raspberry Pi 3 board

Raspberry Pi documentation

The Raspberry Pi has a huge user community making sure that documentation is always up to date. Raspbian, an ARM Debian version of Linux is the standard OS which is regularly upgraded.

Normally the OS is installed on a micro SD card and boot from there. Version 3 of the board however also allows to boot from a USB stick, which has easier access.

Bringing up Raspbian

The operating system can be downloaded here which gives you a zip file. Once uncompressed you get an image file (2017-07-05-raspbian-jessie.img at the time of writing) which you can copy to the micro SD card or a memory stick using dd. To enable USB or network boot mode you must prepare the machine however as described here.

Once you have prepared the card, downloaded and unpacked the OS you can copy it to the SD card or USB stick. Make sure to find out which device corresponds to your SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1 ?) or you USB stick (/dev/sdX where X is your device letter. Make damned sure you know the device letter without doubt because otherwise you may overwrite your hard disk and your PC will not boot any more!)

Copy the OS image to the SD card or USB stick with:

dd bs=4M if=2017-07-05-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/sdX status=progress conv=fsync

This may take a while. Once done, install the device in your Raspberry Pi and boot.

Setting up the system

Once Raspbian is up and running you will have a user pi with password raspberry to log in. This user has the UID 1000 and GID 1000. Unfortunately on my PC Ubuntu system these are the UID and GID of user uli, my main user name. This causes trouble when we want to easily log in through ssh or copy files with scp. I therefore modified the UID and GID for user pi to be 1001 to free 1000 for user uli.

I created a new user uli, added him to the sudoers list (usermod -a -G sudo uli) such that I can easily become super user. Then I modified the UID and GID or pi and uli as described here. Make sure that the user and group ownership of the home directories are also correct (chmod -R uli:uli /home/uli).

Once all this is correctly set up you will have to run raspi-config as super user and enable

• ssh

• vnc

• gpio, spi, i2c

Now you may install additional packages like pigpio, wiringpi, emacs ... using apt install package name

The remote desktop

When you enable VNC in raspi-config the tightvncserver will be installed and run on your system. I use the Remmina Remote Desktop Client which seems to be the standard remote desktop client on PC Ubuntu. However, when running it on the Raspberry Pi server I get an authorization failure which I can get rid of by modifying the authorization method on tightvcnserver fro Unix authorization to VNC authorization. You define a password, which you also use on the client (PC) side.

-- Uli Raich - 2017-08-14

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