Category Archives: Raspberry PI

Raspberry PI

Debian and installing LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment)

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This is the second part of my Raspberry PI posts, the first covered the installation of Debian on to a virtual machine.  This this post I’ll be getting the fresh install to include a lightweight desktop called LXDE 

So first up your Debian and login

Here is the set of command you need to type to get LXDE up and running:

su root
apt-get install lode xorg
apt-get install server-xorg-video-all
exit
starts
 

One last thing I’ll show you is installing packages, as we’ll be using the Raspberry PI we’ll be using the Aptitude which is an old-fashioned GUI interface to assist in installing packages

aptitude
 

So that’s it for today, you have a good looking interface and the ability to install packages

Raspberry PI

Getting ready for my Raspberry PI and installing Debian

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I’ve ordered my Raspberry PI, so I’m planning how and what I’m going to be doing with it.

I have many small projects I’d like to get underway, but ones which spring to mind first are building a home Media Centre, Network Storage device that supports many drives, and one that is hot on my list is the ability to connect the Raspberry PI to my Arduino and build a small portable device that can tell me where and how to access Wifi while I’m out and about.

But before I do anything lets get a virtual machine up and running so we can start playing as if we were on the Raspberry PI:

It has been rumoured that Debian will be the preferred OS to use on the PI due to it small foot print, so let go and get it

http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

I selected and downloaded small CDs and the kfreebsb-i386, mainly because I am running on a Mac and will be running my virtual machine inside of Parallels.

Thing to remember when creating your virtual machine is set your memory to 256mg as this is all you’ll have to play with inside your PI.

Here is a YouTube video that I made which goes through the installation of Debian in real time, as it takes under 15 minutes to install

 

So first steps complete.

The next Blog on the Raspberry PI will be to install a graphical user interface on to your Debian operating system.