How to install Fuse ZX Spectrum emulator in Debian Wheezy Beta and Raspbian On the Raspberry Pi site there is a thread about how to install this spectrum emulator in Arch. I figured it was time to have a go in Wheezy – just for the heck of it – and it worked. Not 100% – still can’t get it to make sound reliably and satisfactorily through HDMI, but I have managed to get it working well through the analog audio out – *so you can use headphones or speakers to get those primitive speccy […more…]
Creating a new user with Sudo privileges in Debian on raspberry pi Someone asked on the Raspberry Pi forums recently how to change the default pi user. There is a command usermod, which could be used to do this if you first created a root password. But there are a lot of reasons for not creating a root password (mostly security and “best practice” related – and people still disagree about it). You can’t use usermod to modify the id you are currently using, so the only way to do it is to create a […more…]
How to safely shutdown or reboot your raspberry pi (Debian/Raspbian) (If you came here because your B+ won’t fully shutdown, visit this page.) Of course, we all know you can shut down any computer by pulling the plug or switching off the switch. Most PCs can be forcibly switched off – even when they’ve crashed – by holding the power button down for 3 seconds. But we also know, or should know, that doing this isn’t good for the computer. For desktops and laptops, it can cause problems on the hard disk drive. For the […more…]
Update 15 November 2016 Installing latest Get_iplayer instructions here… https://raspi.tv/2016/get_iplayer-on-raspberry-pi-update-november-2016 Update 5 November 2014 Installing latest Get_iplayer instructions here… https://raspi.tv/2014/get_iplayer-raspberry-pi-update Installing Get_iplayer on Debian Wheezy Beta on the Raspberry Pi Following on from my original posting on get_iplayer, which was installed on the Debian Squeeze distro for the Raspberry Pi, this is a set of instructions for the Wheezy beta release. It’s quite a bit simplified because we don’t need to bother with installing rpi-update, since most of the needed firmware updates are now incorporated into the distro. :-D That’s progress for you. Starting point […more…]
Using Screen with Raspberry Pi to avoid leaving SSH sessions open (Debian) Tested on Debian Squeeze, Wheezy Beta and Raspbian distros. You may remember from the Get_iplayer installation instructions that I recommended not running the FFMPEG compile via ssh. The reason for this was because when you do something in ssh, if you close the ssh session it kills the process – game over (and that compile takes 3.5 hours). Well I just found out about an excellent little program called screen, which enables you to run processes within a “terminal tty instance”. This allows […more…]
External Storage – USB HDD Sooner or later you will want to attach some sort of external storage to your Raspberry Pi’s USB port. We’ve already seen how to identify and mount a USB flash drive / memory stick. The procedure for mounting and using an external USB hard disk is very similar and equally easy. Until now, I’ve been using 8 Gigabyte memory sticks, but a lot of my media is on a 500 Gig HDD, so I found out how to attach and use that. I’m sharing it here as I think it […more…]
Update 15 November 2016 Installing latest Get_iplayer instructions here… https://raspi.tv/2016/get_iplayer-on-raspberry-pi-update-november-2016 Update 5 November 2014 Installing latest Get_iplayer instructions here… https://raspi.tv/2014/get_iplayer-raspberry-pi-update Get_iplayer is an excellent program that allows you to download content streamed from the BBC’s iplayer server, to watch at a time convenient to you. What makes it excellent is that it is entirely under your control. There is no DRM or restrictions on the content you download. And you don’t need to have the iplayer app on your computer, which is a good thing because it won’t run on the Pi – no Flash. […more…]
How to mount a USB flash drive on Raspberry Pi (or any other linux device) First we need to find out where our system locates the device. With the USB device not plugged in, type… tail -f /var/log/messages Then plug in your USB device and, looking in the new lines which appear, make a note of the ID – it will be something like sda1, sdb1, sda2, sdb2 etc. Then CTRL-C To stop the tail command. In this case the usb stick id is sda1. That means the device is located in /dev/sda1. Next, we […more…]
To kick off this blog I am publishing some high resolution macro photographs of two Raspberry Pi model B computers. Since I have one from RS and one from Farnell it seemed like a good idea to put some good quality photos of the product out there. I’ve already put these on the Raspberry Pi wiki, so they are now out there under the Creative Commons attribution deed. You may use them as you wish as long as you put © Alex Eames 2012 (Creative Commons) Click any photo to see it full resolution […more…]