E-Book description:
Back in 2006, Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory noticed a disturbing trend—interviewees for degree course placement did not know enough about what a computer is or how it worked. So, he set out to design an inexpensive computer that would inspire kids to experiment with computers at home—a similar to the hobbyist computers, such as the Apple II, Amiga, and Commodore 64 computers of a generation before. On February 29, 2012, the first batch of 10,000 Raspberry Pis sold out within a few minutes, crashing the websites of the stores selling them. By the end of 2012 more than 500,000 Raspberry Pis have been sold and not just to school children. The Raspberry Pi credit-card-sized single-board computer costs about $35 and has as much computing power as the early Xbox—more than enough power for playing games, running a home media center, a file server, a website, a small database, or a wireless access point. Its Broadcom System on a chip (SoC) architecture includes a powerful graphics processing unit (GPU), and the single-board design includes a network port, an HDMI connection, two
USB ports, an SD card slot, and 512 MB of memory. There is more power and there are more features available on this small, inexpensive computer today than there were on the expensive desktop computers that ran the original Windows operating system.
This book contains recipes that take advantage of the power and features of the Raspberry Pi to create a number of practical solutions that can be realized without programming—solutions that anyone with minimal computer skills can apply in their home or office. This book is not about educating or inspiring children to learn computer programming. This book is for parents, hobbyists, and computer geeks who would like to learn more about the Raspberry Pi’s “official” Raspbian Linux operating system and the advanced networking solutions that are available for the Raspberry Pi today.
E-Book Author:
Rick Golden
E-Book Table of Contents:
Preface…..1
Chapter 1: Installation and Setup…..7
Introduction…..7
Preparing for the initial boot…..9
Printing a case – the Punnet…..18
Setting up new SD cards…..22
Image writer for Windows cards (Win32DiskImager)…..25
Convert and copy for Linux (dd)…..27
Creating SD cards with BerryBoot…..30
Booting the “official” Raspbian Linux distribution…..37
Shutting down the Raspberry Pi (shutdown)…..41
Chapter 2: Administration…..45
Introduction…..45
Configuring remote access (raspi-config)…..46
Configuring memory usage (raspi-config)…..50
Remote access (SSH)…..53
Remote access (PuTTY)…..58
Changing the login password (passwd)…..62
Chapter 3: Maintenance…..65
Introduction…..65
Updating the operating system (apt-get)…..66
Searching for the software packages (apt-cache)…..74
Installing a package (apt-get)…..75
Package management (aptitude)…..79
Reading the built-in documentation (man)…..83
Reading the built-in documentation (info)…..86
Chapter 4: File Sharing…..91
Introduction…..91
Mounting USB drives (pmount)…..92
Sharing folders from other computers (mount.cifs)…..99
Automounting USB disks at boot (/etc/fstab)…..103
Automounting a shared folder at boot…..110
Creating a file server (Samba)…..114
Sharing an attached USB disk via Samba…..122
Accessing another computer’s files (smbclient)…..125
Chapter 5: Advanced Networking…..133
Introduction…..133
Creating a firewall with ufw…..133
Connecting to the desktop remotely (xrdp)…..137
Installing a web server (Apache, lighttpd, Nginx)…..142
Installing a wiki (MediaWiki)…..154
Creating a wireless access point with hostapd…..170
Index…..185