When the artistic kicks in

Quick burger restaurant (a Belgian burger restaurant much like McDonalds) using raspberry pi for their screen ... Well looks like it doesn't quiet work 😂

Finally installing and setting up my Pi's OS.

*desolders Ethernet, USB and GPIO rails from Raspberry Pi to decrease height*
(Desoldering that shit from a Pi fucking sucks btw, no idea what solder or pads they use but it's garbage)
*boots up Raspbian to see whether it still works and to set things up*
...
Oh shit.. I need keyboard and mouse for this :') fuck me I guess... Long live planning ahead. Does there exist a KVM over TCP/IP yet? 😅

Dear windows 10

I won't mind a weekly 30 minutes update but...

My ubuntu connects to wifi in 2 seconds
My lubuntu connects to wifi in 2 seconds
My archlinux connects in 1 second(don't ask why)
My raspbian starts up and connects in 10 seconds

WHY WOULD YOU TAKE MORE THAN A SYSTEMS BOOTING PROCESS TO GET CONNECTED?

When you're new to Linux and start experenting with your Raspberry Pi and eventually run into a couple of problems and try to fix them, but that only creates more problems and it gets worse and worse, so you give up and just reinstall Raspbian.

Repeat process indefinitely.

Thanks!

NUKE IT FROM ORBIT. It was when i was doing an assignment with my roommate, i was compiling something on my pi and ran netstat afterwards for no reason. I had an ssh-connection from china (logged in too). The pi was shutdown ASAP, i salvaged everything i needed from the sd and dd'ed raspbian on the disk again.

Turns out you were able to login via root (i thought i disabled it) with the password i set (root...). I learned from this, now external logins are only allowed via private key and i have fail2ban set up

I GOT A RASPI I GOT A RASPI IGOT A RASPI I GOT A RA

So I set up push notifications from my Raspberry Pi to my Android phone, to know when exim sent a mail locally.
The easy part was the actual push notifications.
The more tedious part turned out to be looking for a way to send a notification for each mail.
After some research, Procmail seemed to be the only fitting tool to pass info to a command (in order to give the push notification some content so I know what's up)

In the middle of everything, I managed to fuck up exim system-wide, so mails didn't work, which was fucking great of course...

The magic receipt is this:
:0 c
| ${NOTIFY} -t "Pi mail: $SUBJECT"

Anyway, this is the result (using a test mail by mdadm + an actual degraded array I am still waiting on replacement drives for):

In fact I'm a sinful dev, so that I can't easily decide which one is worst. From indenting with tabs, or using nano instead of vim/emacs, to hardcoding database credentials on server, to many hacks and workarounds I use as actual "fixes" when the deadline is upon me and I've tried all I could. But it always led only to my own regret. For instance, my latest sin was that I prefered Debian over Arch and used proprietary graphic drivers to speed up my new setup. But ended up with a curse from St. Ignucius. (check my last rant)

But my worst sin probably goes to when I was "printf-debugging" some issue for a GSM controller on a raspberry pi. I forgot to remove one little print line and deployed the new "fixed" version. I didn't follow that project after that for like a month or so, when the client posted back the device and said that "it just doesn't work anymore". It seemed that raspbian didn't boot beacause the sd card was curroptted. I dd'ed through the card and I noticed that there are billions of lines of "DEBUG:: reading stream from 192.some.shitty.ip", took almost all over the 32G sdcard. Just as I suddenly remembered the cursed line I just added a month ago, I declared the sd card dead with no hesitation, dunce-commented the line (so the history would remember), implemented a time out for the thread containing it, setup a journald unit for my service and removed the redirection of process output to a log file, found a new sd card and installed everything again, and finally posted back the new "fix" to the client.

Moral: Never comfort yourself for the sins you have commited in the past kids, they certainly will come back to you. And also not to do any io especially write to a file on an SD card with ext fs, in a potentially infinite loop with no timeout.

P.S: I'd posted my last rant just before the new week rant last nigh. I really liked the St. Ignucius meme so decided to create a new one. He's very adorable :)

Operation PiBM 5150 XT is continuing this morning!

Raspberry Pi B+ 900mhz
Raspbian Pixel Linux
LG 21:9 2560x1080 monitor
HDMI cable
/boot/config.txt updated for 21:9 monitor
Nyko PS3 USB Compact Flash / SD Reader
4gb CF card as HDD in 5150
4.77mhz IBM 5150 in like new condition
CGA Graphics and Monitor
Late 2012 Macbook Pro
HyperTerm app
USB to DB/25 (RS-232) serial adapter
Devrant Sticker

Raspberry Pi's Raspbian Jessie looks really great! (In my opinion.)

The amount of time it took me to realise that SSH is disabled by default on raspbian.

I learnt something from every single project I made, but this one... it was really different, new language, new library, new hardware.

Problem:
there's an infopoint in a place, that was really hard to use (ball mouse over a monitor)

Solution:
make the screen be touch.

Developing the solution:
- after a bit of research I find out there's a library/project called OpenCV
- there are example programs that detect hands written in C++ (which I know) and Python (which I don't know)
- the whole infopoint works on a raspberry PI, with raspbian (I'm not new to linux, but it's somehow different, plus tons of customization)

So I spend like 3 weeks trying to understand how to make it work, at first, the webcam was on the TV and you could move the mouse just by shaking your hand, but it didn't work too well, so we tried making the webcam look at the screen and then calculate the differences between "no-hands" and "user-hand", but should have been calibrated, wasn't too precise... dropped solution.

put the webcam 30cm above the screen, let it just analyse a few centimeters of sight from the screen and it worked flawlessly, BUT it could just recognise the horizontal axis => had to rework the infopoint UI to make it dumb-easy

It all finally worked, I learnt python, openCV, a bit of photography

Then hated it all and decided to never do that again

You know you've been using nano to much when you press Ctrl+O to save in VS Code

"Raspbian has no auto-updates installed by default"

Raspbian on boot: "running daily apt update and upgrade"

K.

!rant seems that my raspberry pi serial idea is a little bit complex at the moment and may take a more serious turn later, but I have studied and found DOS based TCP/IP software that will allow me to use my 5150 with actual Ethernet. There are a few 8bit ISA Ethernet cards that will work in the 5150 and separate executables that will configure DHCP, DNS, and even allow me to use a terminal emulator and SSH to connect to *nix based computers over lan! I'll keep you all posted!

Gotta learn myself through vim and tmux because I have no choice. My laptop burst and all I have is a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian core + MATE DE installed. Don't really wanna use heavy stuff with it because it'll become really snappy.

Oh well, as long as I can code.

just started IOT project on raspberry pi let's see how it goes waiting for the output

Why does noone implement autoupdater, especialy on linux side? Is there a reason i dont get? Sure, most system stuff is better in apt, but if i install servers, i do not want to wait for these stupid linux release timings! If it were hard, id understand. But most of this is possible with something like GitHub API and 20 Minutes of time. I mean, yeah backwards compatibility and what not, but then handle that internaly.

Example: I use dnsmasq on a raspberry pi. RPI is running raspbian. Raspian is debian 8. Debian 8 has a version of dnsmasq with a pretty annoying bug, which prevents me from using dnssec, as i cant open any cloudflare pages. Why, o why isnt this updated at MY will? Then, if it isnt, why is it so impossible hard to compile this myself, no docs for that, no binaries, NOTHING? Dear server devs, please add atleast basic autoupdate functionality without having to rely on the base os.

Or, give me easily deployable binaries, if you cant write something integrated.

And this is how it starts. I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, quite some time ago. Plain board, just the board and a case. Why? Well, I have no idea. I always wanted one for some reason... and finally got one.

I got a good sd card for it, and flashed raspbian and... now what? What should I do with this?

*Looks up "Cool RPi projects"*

*Nah, I already have a NAS... No, wouldn't really use a media center... play games?*

*Well, let me just install sshd and come back to it later.*

Today, I run pi-hole, jekyll, node, gitd, a ton of other things that ends with d... I am even considering buying an extra one (maybe two).

Now I'm really afraid of what would happen if I give in to the urge of buying sensors and add-on boards.

I am a web dev but recently I have a growing interest in robotics and computer engineering. Thus I bought a raspberry pi 3, installed raspbian and then kodi (for testing purposes) on it, kodi was a bit laggy, don't know what to do with it now. Will try to it as a home server, just like a digitalocean droplet. Better suggestions?

Can you tell about your experience using a different distro on a Raspberry Pi (3B) as the official Raspbian distro ?

So I have a semi big project ongoing:

Because my modem+router combo sucks dick and gets buttfucked to much I want to make my own Router with PPPoE.

So I ordered an 8 euro used switch, 24ports for management, but our IP TV provider is sucking cock too! He uses multicasting to send the fucking IP TV signal. So the switch is not VLan ready and so the network will be flodded.

But that's not the worst...

I don't know how to route VOIP over QoS correctly... So I just hope that part work's!

I also ordered another network switch Wich is manageable + an God damn networking closet. 80 bucks gone again! Wish me luck this works better...

BUT THATS NOT THE WORST BECAUSE NOW COMES THE HEAVY PART!

I wanted to use my old AMD Athlon X2 64bit and 4 gigs of RAM PC to be my powerhouse of the router. I plugged it into the wall, booted, screen error... Thought it might be the integrated graphics card... Unplugged my old one, inserted it.... AND IT WOR... NOPE NOPE IT DIDN'T NOW MY DAMN MOTHERBOARD IS FUCKING FRIED TO DUST BECAUSE OF THE GOD DAMN ... I DONT EVEN KNOW! AAAAA

So I thought I could temporarily use my raspberry pi one model b, a good fellow with multiple years of usage! I plugged in the sd card into my girls laptop, wasn't at home, and her God damn internet downloaded that shitty raspbian (sorry raspi but your servers sometimes are very slow) and after the download I realized her GOD DAMN SD READER DIDNT FUCKING WORK!!!

SO I GUESS I WILL WAIT!

I downloaded Go to my Raspberry Pi with the wireless connection of my school and the download was running for 30 minutes (99mb file). (I had a download speed of 55 Kbit/s.) Then I saw I downloaded the wrong one which isn’t working with Raspbian. 😒

Tried to upgrade an old PI to run Raspbian Stretch..
“Tried” as in “now I’m rage quitting and re-installing a new image”

Left my spare screen at the office, so my first introduction to the new PIXEL UI is on my UHD TV

Thinking back, it’s pretty terrible how long it took to create my first real development project.

When I was the ages of 13-18 I built websites on and off but I would never consider them good enough. I would literally design a bunch of images and then, using just HTML, put all the images together like a puzzle using exact pixel locations. Might be fine and dandy now but back then it would look great on my monitor but on others it would be an absolute mess.

Anyways, after that I got in college and started learning C++ and did assignments but I don’t count those as my own either. Not until I was 29 (my current age) did I finally develop a program assigned by my internship. Prior to that I always just re-learned C++ over and over again off and on because I had no clue where to go after that.

Apologies for the long intro. So the first development project that I feel is legit at my internship I had to use my companies API to track the amount of time it took for them to encrypt a packet and then decrypt it as well as grabbing the packet and seeing how long the hash was, the letters used in which position and so on. Essentially grab a whole bunch of statistics from their software and then output it to an excel document. It had a menu, and I had to make it work on Windows, Ubuntu, Raspbian, and some other systems on different devices.

I was actually really proud of what I ended up with and they use it to test their new versions and compare and so forth.

When you spend an hour trying to figure out why your rsync command isn't working, then you realise it's because Raspbian doesn't have rsync in it by default 😒

Fucking Linux tho

I started using Linux on a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian mostly accessing it over putty to install packages and running python scripts. I recently installed Debian Stretch with Raspberry Pi Desktop on an old Laptop to program in python because the package manager is so convenient.I really like the experience in using this none bloated os. Wanting to buy a refurbished Thinkpad to use as a daily driver it is really confusing which Distro to pick.
Just stay with Debian or is it worth to check out other distros?

Would you like a Raspberry Pi ? If yes, what kind of project would you like to do with ?

So, today, I wanted to try setting up a wireguard VPN server on my little raspberry pi at home. I... expected /some/ issues, but what I found dumbfounded me.

1 - I already had the wireguard package from the unstable branch of the main raspbian repo installed... Huh, okay.
2 - Setting up config was extremely easy... Wow, so the rumors were true. Wireguard really is almost dumb-simple.
3 - Failed to create a network interface? Oh, trouble, here it is! So lets see... modprobe wireguard... Nope. Don't have the module? What?
4 - Reconfigure package to rebuild the module - missing kernel headers? Huh... weird

This was the simple stuff... Then I went down the rabbit hole of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem:

1 - There is the Raspberry Pi Bootloader, that is apparently separate from the Kernel itself. And I didn't seem to have any of the standard linux-image-* installed... What? Weird, yet there I was, running a 4.19.42-v7+ kernel...
2 - No kernel and no headers... What... The... Fuck
3 - Okay, so... Lets just... try to install the latest kernel image then? One apt-get install... It downloaded the image, but during package configuration, it failed because... I didn't have... its headers? What? What for? And if it needs them (for whatever reason), why isn't the headers package as a dependency? Ugh, whatever...
4 - Another apt-get install and... Okay, building the initrd image aaaaand...
FAIL
WHAT. What is it this time!?

Oh... Ran... No more space on device? What? Is /boot independent? Of course it is, it has to be, its a bloody different filesystem

Okay, so, lets che-OH MY GOD WTF.

Its just bloody 45 MBs big! The entire /boot is just 45 MBs large. WHY. THE. FUCK.

This was a default raspbian install from I have no idea when. But... Why. Oh WHY would ANYONE pre-configure /boot to be this incredibly tiny!?

No wonder the new init ramdisk couldn't fit in there! Its already used up from 64%!

Thanks, Raspbian Devs, now I gotta reinstall the whole system because, yes, the /boot is, of course, sector 8192. Just far enough from 2048 that there are *some* sectors free - About 3 MBs.

So what did I try? Remove the partition and recreate it from the very beginning. Only... I never tried in in the past, and okay, kernel doesn't like having the partition where its image resides deleted on the fly, it will not give up FDs pointing there or something.

So now, I have a system I cannot reboot, or it will never boot back up :|

Thanks, Raspbian!

I need to get a cheap 1U somewhere or something T.T

How do you guys monitor programs on your servers?

For example, I have a raspberry pi zero w running raspbian (headless). On this pi, I have a bunch of discord bots and web scrapers running at the same time. My solution was to run them all from a bash file:

Python3 discordbot1.py &
Python3 discordbot2.py &
Python3 webscraper1.py &
Node webscraper2.js & etc.

Is there a better way I could be running these services? How is stuff like this usually done?

Alright! I'm starting to like DietPI.

I liked Raspbian before, but setting up a headless system really was a PITA.

And with DietPI... it seems as if it was made for headless setups.

Finally, I'll have my proxy hub.

The moment when your client gives you a Pi Zero and 4 IR transceivers, tells you it worked on Arduino now writes them a driver that bit-bangs them into 4 TTYs.

I‘ve now my first smart home device. It is only a power outlet, but the story behind it is a bit special.
Because Apple trapped me in there ecosystem I wanted to have a HomeKit compatible outlet. The problem with that: Either to expensive or to big. So my ne mission: Connect a non HomeKit device to HomeKit, but without a too expensive proprietary gateway/bridge.
After a bit of googling I found a software called "Homebridge", build to run on a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately I had one old RasbPi 1 B. So I installed a new Raspbian and installed Homebridge. I forgot how slow it was.
Then I bought a cheap (but good) ZigBee outlet and a ZigBee USB Dongle. With a plugin for Homebridge it was very easy to connect the ZigBee Dongle.
Then I tried to connect the outlet, but the log said "Unrecognized device". After a bit of research I found out that the outlet is not supported by the homebridge-zigbee plugin. As a software engineer I tried to find a solution for it, so I reverse engineered the device recognition (very easy because Homebridge is a node application). After a while I managed to add the configuration for the outlet to the plugin.
And see, it became light.

*downloading raspbian stretch image over torrent*

saying 4GB

*download complete after hours (really low-speed connection)*

Windows explorer shows 14,6 Gig

THANKS MERKEL!

Has anyone used Swift on Linux? I've had it on Ubuntu, Debian8, and Raspbian (Pi-0) and use it for some things but mostly examples

No internet! I have been without home WiFi for a week now and I can't download big files over my hotspot as it is expensive. I need to download a Raspbian image for my Raspberry Pi but it is ~1 gigabyte. Been needing to get my Raspberry Pi set up to turn it into a server for a site I am currently creating.

Is it just me or DOES RASPBIAN TAKE A FUCKING SHITLOAD OF TIME TO WRITE? WHEN THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO INSTALL OPENCV NOW? I FUCKING HAVE CLASS TOMORROW WHICH IS NOW TECHNICALLY TODAY!

Building atom on an RPI 2 with this fuckstickle of a package manager is a bloody nightmare. Works without issue on Raspbian Jessie, implodes into a spectacular clusterfuckeroni on Raspbian Stretch.

Been on it since yesterday, 10/10 weekend saved.

I think I finally reached a point where I Have to completely reinstall my RPi.

Running Raspbian, I was under the impression their kernel releases worked the same way a pure Debian release worked - That the kernel was somewhere in the system repository.

Turns out it was, but in a different pool. And also turns out the new kernel and initramfs won't fit into my /boot as, for some reason, it is under 50 MBs in size. I dunno why, but I don't have any unallocated space left to grow the partition...

I have no idea why the boot is so small (Probably because, when I was setting the system up, I wasn't really that good with Linux yet, and just went with defaults).

What do you guys think - Is it better to run the native Raspbian system (Formerly RaspberryPi OS), or go with a pureblood Debian for Arm? (Yes, I already checked, my HW revision [3B+] is already compatible])