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Mini Guides

A collection of 15 posts

Mini Guide: Read-only boot on the ROCK Pi

Mini Guide: Read-only boot on the ROCK Pi

There are various use cases for booting a read only OS, including but not limited to Kiosk or IoT projects. I've previously written about an overlay-based read-only Pi setup here. This Mini Guide looks at achieving the same thing on the Rock 4 series (it may work with

Mini Guide: Rich MOTD messages with Markdown and glow

Mini Guide: Rich MOTD messages with Markdown and glow

A Message of The Day (MOTD) banner is probably fairly familiar to those of us who SSH around, but how about a richly formatted message with colour and style? This mini-guide explains how to add a richly formatted MOTD banner that is displayed to any user starting a new terminal

Mini Guide: Easy Dell iDRAC access (on Linux)

Mini Guide: Easy Dell iDRAC access (on Linux)

Dell's IDRAC IPMI/Lights-out/Remote KVM feature is great except for one thing. It's uses Java Web Start to deliver the remote control interface - at least on some versions. The mini-guide explains how to access it from a computer that struggles, or even refuses to

Quick AT Commands from the Linux Shell

Quick AT Commands from the Linux Shell

There are numerous tools available for Linux that allow the user to interact with Serial devices (usually known as Terminals or Serial Terminals), such as mincom or screen to name two, which are generally great at what they do, but experience shows they are not so good for scripting -

Mini Guide: DHCP Controlled Hostname on Raspbian

Mini Guide: DHCP Controlled Hostname on Raspbian

DHCP Controlled Hostname on Raspbian Note: This note was originally in the Network Booting a Raspberry Pi 3 from an Ubuntu Server post. In theory the configuration should be as simple as stated below: { ... host pi3-1 { hardware ethernet b8:27:eb:41:8e:fa; fixed-address 192.168.1.59; option

Mini Guide: DHCP Reservations

Mini Guide: DHCP Reservations

DHCP Reservations Note: This note was originally in the Network Booting a Raspberry Pi 3 from an Ubuntu Server post. To make life easier DHCP Address reservations can be added in the main body of the DHCP config so that each MAC Address gets assigned the same IP: { ... host pi3-1

Mini Guide: NFS Debugging

Mini Guide: NFS Debugging

NFS Debugging Note: This note was originally in the Network Booting a Raspberry Pi 3 from an Ubuntu Server post. Initially when trying to understand whether the Pi was booting from the network or not it was useful to enable NFS debugging with rpcdebug -m nfsd -s proc which reports

Mini Guide: Controlling Screen Blanking

Mini Guide: Controlling Screen Blanking

Controlling Screen Blanking Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi 2/3: Chromium in Kiosk mode post. The screen can be turned off using the following command: xset -display :0.0 dpms force off And on: xset -display :0.0 dpms force on These could be used in

Mini Guide: Pi User and Management User(s)

Mini Guide: Pi User and Management User(s)

Pi User and Management User(s) Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi 2/3: Chromium in Kiosk mode post. Auto-login to the GUI works regardless of the pi user's password. It is worth changing this for security, potentially creating a management user which requires a

Mini Guide: Raspberry Pi Memory Split

Mini Guide: Raspberry Pi Memory Split

Memory Split Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi 2/3: Chromium in Kiosk mode post. The memory available to the GPU can be configured by: * sudo raspi-config * Option 7 (Advanced) * Option A3 (Memory Split) This may be useful when rendering more visually-intensive pages.

Mini Guide: Raspberry Pi Overscan and HDMI Modes

Mini Guide: Raspberry Pi Overscan and HDMI Modes

Overscan and HDMI Modes Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi 2/3: Chromium in Kiosk mode post. In some cases the image may not fill the screen. The overscan setting below can help, as well as forcing certain HDMI modes as document [here](From https://www.raspberrypi.

Mini Guide: Raspberry Pi Serial Console

Mini Guide: Raspberry Pi Serial Console

Serial console Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi, overlayfs read-write root, read-only NFS base post. It's quite easy to listen on the serial console as you don't have to worry about the voltage differences. Full documentation here. I have many Prolific Technology, Inc.

Mini Guide: Easier Script Debugging

Mini Guide: Easier Script Debugging

Debugging Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi, overlayfs read-write root, read-only NFS base post. In trying to get the various options out there working I found a number of debugging strategies helpful, they're mostly simple - First, set -v - put this after the #!/bin/

Mini Guide: Read only Raspberry Pi (without NFS)

Mini Guide: Read only Raspberry Pi (without NFS)

Without NFS Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi, overlayfs read-write root, read-only NFS base post. This setup described in the article above also works without the NFS setup. As we plan to have no 'proper' storage and RAM limits the size of writes we can

Mini Guide: Watching the file-system on Linux

Mini Guide: Watching the file-system on Linux

Watching the file-system Note: This note was originally in the Raspberry Pi, overlayfs read-write root, read-only NFS base post. NFS logging appeared to be quite opaque to me, so it proved useful to be able to observe the relevant file-system activity. We can watch the file-system activity (when the Pi