Raspberry Pi

I guess you could set up apache or something and serve a Web page but I'm not sure, more of a low level programming guy

Bandwagon_sl said:

So I got a 64gb card for the Pi, can't get it to boot. It did one time, installed the OS, now it won't boot. From the sounds of it, the Pi needs a FAT partition to be bootable, correct? I made a 4gb partition on the 64gb card and installed the OS, still nothing.
Oh well, I'll keep playing with the 4gb card for now.

I got tightVNC setup to run at boot, and I have a wifi dongle and pi camera on the way. I'll see if I can set up everything I want using wifi before trying to switch over to 4g.

edit: Nevermind, I didn't get it to run at boot. Noodle,theseare the instructions I'm trying to follow. Since I'm a windows guy with zero programming experience, I'm used to creating a batch file and just dropping it into the startup folder. Do you know how I can do this on the pi? The default login using tightVNC is a sudo user, and I don't know how to change that so that I'm logged in as a superuser in the GUI. Trying to change permissions and move files/write scripts via the command line is annoying.

Click to expand...

I recently set out to do exactly what you are trying to do bandwagon. I'm a total linux noob, and I found the exact same website but still ended up spending most of an afternoon getting it to work.

If I recall correctly, the problem is that command line to start the VNC server has an argument that was either deprecated or never worked to begin with. So, i'm talking about the bold line here:

#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/vncboot

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: vncboot
# Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop: $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start VNC Server at boot time
# Description: Start VNC Server at boot time.
### END INIT INFO

USER=pi
HOME=/home/pi

export USER HOME

case "$1" in
start)
echo "Starting VNC Server"
#Insert your favoured settings for a VNC session
su - pi -c "/usr/bin/vncserver :0 -geometry 1280x800 -depth 16 -pixelformat rgb565"
;;

stop)
echo "Stopping VNC Server"
/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :0
;;

*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/vncboot {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;
esac

exit 0

--------------------------------------------------------------------

You'll notice that's different from the command line arguments they use at the top of the article:

#!/bin/sh
vncserver :0 -geometry 1920x1080 -depth 24 -dpi 96

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, my mistake in debugging this was just in making that shell script, following their steps, restarting the thing and hoping it worked.

Instead:

1) Make sure a vnc server isn't actually running. There is a linux way to do this I think. I have no idea what it is. I just tried connecting from another PC on my network.
2) Run the shell script yourself from the command line. Does it work? Try connecting from your pc. Better yet, try executing just the single command line for starting the vnc server. Once you get that to work, put THAT into your shell script in place of the bolded line above, and then try the script
3) Once you get (2) to start a vnc server for you, try the boot sequencing steps. If the shell script works but the steps to start on boot don't work, then you're past my linux debugging skills.

Separately, there *might* be a default password setup by tightVNC. I just don't remember. If you connect from your PC and you're prompted for a password, then I'd say that you're making progress. Then you can worry about the password.

This page has the command line arguments for tightvnc:

TightVNC: Manual Page for vncserver(1)

The bolded line above looks legit, but I do seem to recall that that was my problem. Anyway, get that base case working of just getting a VNC server running, use that command in your shell script, and see where you get stuck next.

Bandwagon_sl said:

So I got a 64gb card for the Pi, can't get it to boot. It did one time, installed the OS, now it won't boot. From the sounds of it, the Pi needs a FAT partition to be bootable, correct? I made a 4gb partition on the 64gb card and installed the OS, still nothing.
Oh well, I'll keep playing with the 4gb card for now.

I got tightVNC setup to run at boot, and I have a wifi dongle and pi camera on the way. I'll see if I can set up everything I want using wifi before trying to switch over to 4g.

edit: Nevermind, I didn't get it to run at boot. Noodle,theseare the instructions I'm trying to follow. Since I'm a windows guy with zero programming experience, I'm used to creating a batch file and just dropping it into the startup folder. Do you know how I can do this on the pi? The default login using tightVNC is a sudeo user, and I don't know how to change that so that I'm logged in as a superuser in the GUI. Trying to change permissions and move files/write scripts via the command line is annoying.

Click to expand...

If you use WinSCP on your windows machine and connect to the pi you can drag/drop stuff onto the pi - but also you can move stuff around on the pi with ease. It's like a windows explorer gui basically. You can also double click files and edit them in a notepad box that opens up on Windows. It's a bit easier for a newcomer to linux.

As far as running something at startup those instructions should work - are you placing it in /etc/init.d/ ?

The command:
is running VNC server as a super user, I believe. Does it work with 'su' and "-pi -c" taken out?

I've never used VNC before on the pi, so I'm not too well versed.

You can add the user to the sudoer list.

If you're adding a new user: sudo adduser <username> sudo

If you're editing a user you need to edit the sudoer file:

Be careful giving people sudo access though. You can probably pop the card into your laptop but I'm not sure if Windows/Mac will take over and fuck up the partitions.

What language?

It depends what you're doing as well, because linux and windows will use different system libraries and you'll compile the code differently.

If it's C/C++ you can try:

C, C++ Programming Tutorials - Cprogramming.com

If Python:

Learn Python

I don't know how much you get with a free trial, but I think $29.99 for that isn't a bad price. You could also find it free "somewhere" I'm sure.

For other languages it's a little different. Also good places for questions are stackoverflow (SORT OF, they're dicks), /r/learnprogramming, /r/programming, and also our very own comp sci thread - we love to solve programming problems:

Majoring in Comp Sci

Don't worry if you feel a question is too basic or stupid, we've all been there and since we're coders we can't help but debug stuff.

Also don't worry about Linux 101 stuff, we all started somewhere with it - sometimes if you don't know what you're looking for it can be difficult.

Excuse my brevity as I'm on my phone.

You don't actually need an IDE to write python (or any language) code. I usually use notepad++ . That said, pycharm is probably fine.

If you have code you want to test with wjndows you'll need to install python 2. 7 or whatever flavor and include it in your PATH. then you just run your py files from the command line. Since it's an interpreted language you don't really build it.

It will be the same on the pi, just installing whatever packages necessary.

I've only built one gui in python and it was a wjndows app, but the comp Sci thread has a few guys that write python professionally.

I was thinking of getting one of these to attach to my TV and stereo so I can run all the media I own through this one system with no other components. Think I could swing that?

I think it might have trouble being able to get the throughput you want. Maybe a RPI3?

Just announced today, the new Raspberry Pi 3:Introducing the Raspberry Pi 3 | Hackaday