Raspberry Pi: an Apache internet, MPD music, MySQL database and NFS file server.

The micro computer

This web page is served by a Debian Linux Apache2 web server running on a Raspberry Pi model B (Rpi) micro computer. I bought the RPi online at RS Components in the UK. The board is powered by a Chinese OTB 2A 5V micro-usb power adapter, bought at PC-CAM web shop. I use the ethernet port of the Raspberry Pi to connect it to my router.> The Raspbery Pi computer was protected by an Adafruit Design Midnight Blue case (see image above).

Creating the operating system disk

The operating system is the Raspbian "wheezy" Linux Debian version downloaded from http://www.raspberrypi.org/ and installed on an 8 GB Sandisk SD-card. The command to install the operating system on the SD-card from my Debian computer was:

user@chaos:~$ dd if=2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdi

where /dev/sdi was the device location of the SD-card. You can look up the device location with dmesg, which gives a message when a new device is found. If the SD-card is mounted on your computer first unmount it (umount /dev/sdi1) before using dd.

Logging in using secure shell

After the Raspberry Pi had booted with this card, I connected to it through ssh from a terminal from my computer:

user@chaos:~$ ssh -X -l pi 192.168.0.111
[email protected]'s password:

Now I could log into Rapberry computer and I logged in as user pi with password raspberry, this gave the following message indicating that I had logged in:

Linux raspberrypi 3.2.27+ #250 PREEMPT Thu Oct 18 19:03:02 BST 2012 armv6l
The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software; the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

Last login: Thu Jan 3 14:18:15 2013 from 192.168.0.105 pi@raspberrypi ~ $

Updating the operating system

This done, you need first to configure and update the Raspberry Pi using:

pi@raspberrypi~$ sudo raspi-config

This gives you a menu of choices that you have to follow and change. Do change your password, timezoen, expand the rootfs system to use your whole SD card and update raspi-config (see below).

Now you also have to update all the packages in the Debian distribution, do:

pi@raspberrypi~$ sudo apt-get update

Followed by:

pi@raspberrypi~$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It will take a while before all new updates have been downloaded and installed.

That's it, Enjoy!!!

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Last modified: Wed Sep 2 12:50:56 CEST 2015