su password and bits and bobs

[Boreatton Scouts]

0) Hurrah! Got a raspberrypi for my scouts yesterday and been playing getting basics working… and it works! Random usb mice and keyboards work out of the box. Blackberry charger powers it nicely. But very s  l  o  w…. I guess that's to get used to! More importantly, thanks for sending the raspberrypi guys – scouts are very excited to get one so early! very cool! We are playing at making lego cases to go with our lego robotics theme, and I want to get basic office things working quickly if poss.

1) Main problem is that I do not know the su password. The note that came with the device said that no password was needed but it complains about invalid password with "su". The login as Pi with password susi is fine.

2) Any help at getting wifi going? The wired ethernet worked out of the box but I may have been optimistic getting a Netgear WMA1000M… I also have an old Sweex usb wifi adapter…

3) HDMI cable worked out of the box connecting using the PS3 cable. To get something more portable, I thought the little philips pico projector looked nice, but doesn't use HDMI. Is it easy to get the raspberrypi to send output through the video RCA out?

4) I got a sony class4 8G SD card from Maplins which was fine, but using the win32diskimager from the link on the wiki it has foramtted the sd card so I only see 2Gb of which 1.7Gb is occupied – is the rest hiding in an empty partition or do I need to remake the bootable SD card in a more specific way.

5) sorry to pester with lots of trivial qs – hope to get up to speed soon, and get on to robotics with it – we have worked with Puzzlebox Mindstorms and the python source from that should run once we get Bluetooth running…

Alan (aka Boreatton Scouts)

[ukscone]

Boreatton Scouts said:



1) Main problem is that I do not know the su password. The note that came with the device said that no password was needed but it complains about invalid password with "su". The login as Pi with password susi is fine.


Which distro is this? debian? If yes then you don't use su but rather sudo. sudo executes a single command as root but asks for the user's password rather than the root one. If you really need a rootshell then you would do

sudo su

but that's cheating really

[dom]

1) "sudo passwd" will set the root passwd

2) Wifi setup is non-trivial. I'm sure there will be instructions for specific cards posted soon.

3) Boot without HDMI cable plugged in, and composite should be active.

4) Yes. There is a small FAT partition and a small swap partition taking up the remaining space.

[ukscone]

There is also a new debian release so you might want to download that before doing anything major

http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

[Boreatton Scouts]

Thanks everyone,

First, the pi password was suse not susi (oops)

re ukscone – thanks – it is the debian distro – haven't tried cheating yet… have just downloaded the updated img so will go forward with that!

re dom – thanks again – composite works after rebooting with hdmi disconnected, but a bit grainy – ho hum…

Can I see the fat partition as usable space? it was an 8Gb card so about 6Gb has hidden itself somewhere…?

I'll try the "sudo passwd" – I like to think that I am in control of the computer and not vice-versa! Being able to override all the protections that stop me doing silly things is somehow reassuring…

Alan

[ukscone]

I think that the user password in the new debian release is different.

iirc it's now user = pi passwd = raspberry

but if i'm wrong i'm sure someone will pipe up

[rurwin]

Rather than set a root password, which is deprecated on Debian, "sudo -i" will get you a root command prompt.

The SD card will be partitioned as 2GB. All three partitions are within that. You need to use a partition management program to re-partition and get the extra space back.

[ukscone]

rurwin said:


Rather than set a root password, which is deprecated on Debian, "sudo -i" will get you a root command prompt.


I always forget about options for sudo, at least my fingers never seem to type then even when my brain tells them too

[texy]

rurwin said:



The SD card will be partitioned as 2GB. All three partitions are within that. You need to use a partition management program to re-partition and get the extra space back.


Liam Fraser has a series of raspberry pi tutorials on YouTube that will show you how to realocate the space on the SD cards.

Texy

[Boreatton Scouts]

That all works as per above suggestions - the gparted was fine but needed to be run in safe mode as it gave a black screen on my acer windows 7 laptop in default mode, but then worked fine and I have my 8GB back.

sudo passwd now lets me mess stuff up

so main thing now is to get wifi and bluetooth and get office software as a basic PC setup...

[mahjongg]

Boreatton Scouts said:


0) Hurrah! Got a raspberrypi for my scouts yesterday and been playing getting basics working… and it works! Random usb mice and keyboards work out of the box. Blackberry charger powers it nicely. But very s  l  o  w…. I guess that"s to get used to!


Ah, a PI for the JOTA/JOTI?!

(for JOTA think "morse encoder")

You think the R-PI is slow? have look at this linux system, it takes four hours to boot Ubuntu" If it had a graphical video display It would take days to boot to the GUI!

Im not sure it is even (much) cheaper than the R-PI.

http://www.extremetech.com/ext.....t-linux-pc

[plugwash]

rurwin said:


Rather than set a root password, which is deprecated on Debian,


Do you have a source for that claim?

[asb]

plugwash: http://wiki.debian.org/sudo

Squeeze desktop installs set up sudo rather than a root login.

[jbeale]

Boreatton Scouts said:


so main thing now is to get wifi and bluetooth and get office software as a basic PC setup...


I'll be curious to know if you find the Pi is really usable for office software applications. Maybe it will be ok if you use stripped-down programs and a light desktop, etc. With "equivalent to Pentium 2 300 MHz" performance you probably don't want software designed to run on processors which are 10x or 100x faster. My thought is that the Pi is best suited for simple text editing (eg. developing software), and embedded control and data acquisition applications.

[Joe Schmoe]

If that (*) is true, then it begs the question as to why there is a GUI at all.  I.e., no sensible person will use the GUI if the GUI is unusable.

(*) And, in general, what I am reading here about the slowness.

[mahjongg]

My thought is that the Pi is best suited for simple text editing (eg. developing software), and embedded control and data acquisition applications.


Nonsense, the R-PI will come with Abiword, which is a perfectly useable wordprocessor, which will run fine on a R-PI. True, you probably wouldn't want to use open-office or something like it, but even a photoshop like application like the GIMP works fine.

There are many useable GUI applications for the R-PI, and probably many more coming from the QT (NOKIA) people, as they are busy building applications specifically for the R-PI. See the QTonPI site:

http://wiki.qt-project.org/QtonPi

[jbeale]

Joe Schmoe said:


If that (*) is true, then it begs the question as to why there is a GUI at all.


I think if you use a "light" desktop (LXDE) and applications that are designed for slower CPUs, it will be a lot more usable than just throwing the latest everything+kitchen-sink office package on it.  Of course what the "unusable" threshold is, is sort of a personal decision.  The GPU part of the SoC is more modern than the CPU, given it can do 1080p mp4 playback, so in theory the GUI could be both modern and fast, but so far I don't think any of the available desktops are using GPU acceleration (?) Hopefully that will change.

What won't change, we're told, is the onboard 256 MB memory limit. That is quite small by modern desktop standards (and it's shared with the GPU framebuffer, so not all is available for applications). Any big application (or several small ones at once) will be very limited in performance. Using a SD Card or USB stick as swap space is not going to be fast.

[mahjongg]

Yes, soon we will have puppy linux, a distro that is famous for running extremely well on older systems, with little RAM, and providing a wealth of (GUI) applications.

What you will also start to see is applications running (standalone, that is without starting from a GUI) on a dedicated Linux derivate, an example is OpenElec with XBMC running on top of it.

OpenElec runs in less than 128MB, so that the extended openGL video acceleration becomes available.

The R-PI is strange in that its like having a 300MHz pentium 2 based system combined with a modern 3D Graphics card.

A lot can be done, but it takes some re-thinking.

A lot of capabilities are as yet not implemented, for example only in the very latest distro something essential as memory caching has been enabled. And the 2D video still doesn't have any hardware acceleration, slowing down screen drawing considerable. Lots of work to do, its early times yet.

[Myra]

The slowness you are seeing is mainly the result of the X windowing system running in software. This is why the little processor load rectangle turns solid green whenever you do anything related to windows. We have developers working on offloading this to the hardware, remember that the processor is mostly a GPU with a little ARM tucked into a corner!

When this is done, it will be much faster. I did some Java benchmarking and for non-graphics stuff, the RPi ran at about 1/7 the speed of my laptop (which is a rather ordinary laptop that's a few years old). So the RPi is not speedy by any means, but once the X problem is fixed, those massive delays that you're seeing will largely go away.

[Boreatton Scouts]

mahjongg said "you wouldn"t want to use open office..." - actually, I would - the main applications the scouts use are powerpoints and you tube so for the RPi to be a "real" computer it has to be able to do that! The flash stuff I guess is en route, but it would be nice to run a powerpoint compatable GUI based program. I know the idea is to get away from IT teaching being all about being microsoft users, but my scouts just use te powerpoint as the way they record what they"ve been doing - text editors just don"t work the way they want to! What"s the best option out there for a powerpointlike presentation program?
In the meantime, my daughter (one of my scouts) has made a nice lego case (there isn"t an option to upload photos here is there?) and I have had to have a day off from techy stuff taking the older scouts skydiving (indoors) but will get back to sorting out the basics tomorrow before the scouts regroup on Tues .
The wifi tutorial looks nice and straightforward and the sweex cheapo usb wifi looks like it may work (not absolutely sure that the chipset is indeed listed but I think it is ...). Ubuntu seemed much more intuitive with synaptic rather than aptitude... and all the wifi adapters worked with ubunto whereas debian seems much more picky... - the netgear micro usb wifi adaptor WNA1000M froze the mouse and lsusb, but works fine when I just plug it in to the ubuntu box.
Finally, one of the benefits of the RPi is it is small and portable and can run off batteries - The Philips pico projector is a nice battery powered projector that will run from batteries and give a rgb screen, and is about the same size as the computer - I thought they made quite a nice combination to make a battery powered system

[asb]

You can install synaptic on Debian (haven't tried it on my Pi though). Wifi being a little fiddly at the moment isn't really a fundamental Debian vs Ubuntu thing - I'm sure many more devices will work out of the box in a future release.