My First 5 Minutes on a RaspberryPi
by kacang bawang
Greetings and salutations. It has been a really long time since my last post. IRL job has been sucking the life out of me. Someday I will tell you all about it…
Anyhow, I’ve been carving out some time for playing with a raspberrypi display and wanted to save some notes for posterity. This more a note to self than anything, but if someone ends up here via googling, I hope it will be of help.
Without further ado, here are the first things I do after booting up a new RaspberryPi installation.
1. Connect and change default password
Connect to the Pi via a LAN cable. Easiest way to achieve this is to plug it into your router. Figure out its IP address and SSH in.
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#change password sudo passwd |
2. raspi-config
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#use raspi-config to change locale, keyboard layout, expand flash and change hostname. raspi-config |
3. (Optional) Disable IPv6
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# edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add these. Will be active on next reboot. net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1 net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1 |
4. Install wireless dongle
Plug in a USB wifi adapter. If you bought a good one, it will just work. Status can be checked by:
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#look through boot messages dmesg #list loaded kernel modules lsmod |
5. (Optional) Disable built-in wireless.
If you are on RaspberryPi3 then you have a built-in wireless adapter. Sound cool, yes? Too bad, it’s not… The built in adapter sucks balls. As in, dropped connections and lagggggggggggg. For this reason I use a wife dongle (see above) and disable the built-in.
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#edit /boot/config.txt to add: dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi |
Be warned that this only works with the newer firmware versions (now = May 2017). For this reason we will run a firmware update in the next few steps. Changes will activate on reboot.
NOTE: You should still be on a LAN connection when doing this step! Unless you want to risk getting locked out…
6. Configure wpa_supplicant
To connect the Pi to your wifi network, we need to configure wpa_supplicant. These days it is quite easy.
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#edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and add: network={ ssid="MyWifi" psk="mypassword" } |
Check wifi connection status via iwconfig.
7. Run apt-get update/upgrade
Now it is finally time to run the first system update.
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sudo apt-get -y update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade |
This may take a little while…
8. Run firmware update.
Let’s run the firmware update to take advantage of the wifi-disabling boot options.
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#we will need this package sudo apt-get install rpi-update #now do the update sudo rpi-update |
Now if we reboot, the built-in wireless should be disabled.
9. Install unattended-upgrades
Get the security updates going.
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sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades |
10. (Optional) Debloat.
If you are running the lite image you’re good to go. If you’re running the full there is debloating to be done. This will be described in the next post.