Raspberry Pi 6 Operating Systems

Like any computer a Raspberry Pi requires an operating system - software that allows you to do computery stuff with the hardware. Phones, laptops and even some washing machines have operating systems.  Windows is an operating system and so is Android, Mac OSX, Linux - there are hundreds of different operating systems out there.

This post describes how to install 6 different operating systems for your Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi can use a number of the operating systems available - all for free. You just need to download one and write it to an SD Card to plug in to the RPi. The SD Card is much like a hard-disk on a computer, just like Windows is installed on a laptop's hard-drive, Raspberry Pi Operating systems must be installed on the SD Card.

CentOS 6.5 Install Problem

I have recently installed CentOS 6.5 on a couple of computers, once without any problems and once with a fatal hang during install.  With both installs I chose to overwrite any existing partitions and use the whole hard-drive.

The problem during the failed install happened as the new partitions were being created. An error window including 'Unable to read group information from repositories' had a Retry button that did nothing. Google was no help (other than to say it might be a DVD read problem) but with some persistence I found a straight-forward solution.

If you get this error, power off the computer then start the installation process again. This time choose to overwrite an existing installation and CentOS will install without this problem recurring.

Easy!

Add An Existing Local Git To Github.com

Git is a great way to manage different versions of your code during development. I use it on my local machine when developing on my own but occasionally need to start working with others. This is a step-by-step description of how to upload a local git repository to github.com for sharing and collaborating.

Useful Git Commands

I've made several posts about git as I was learning to use it. This is a list of all the useful commands I found in the form of a cheat sheet.

Intro to Git Version Control

This is a simple story to illustrate how to do basic revision control with Git. I've had a couple of nightmares with Git repositories - it has been a bit of a git getting my head around how it works.

If you don't know what Git is, it's a distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system.  It's widely used to share open source code and is great for managing your code base with speed and, if you pay at github.com private.

Uninstalling Linux Packages

Advanced Package Tool (Apt) is one of the programmes that make Linux such an awesome operating system.  It allows you to install any of 1000s of libraries, commands, tools and applications and Sourceforge have a good introduction for this.  However there is little info about how to uninstall anything and clean up properly. Vast amounts of hard-drive space can be taken up by files left over after an uninstall.  This post gives you the information to thoroughly uninstall programmes and any extra dependencies that came with them. Keep your Linux machine as clean as Mr. Clean!

Raspberry Pi Motion Detection Security Camera

We have weekly deliveries of meat or vegetables to our home that are left outside our house if we are not there to receive them.  Although they are only there for a few hours and hidden behind some planters someone noticed them and started stealing them. I decided to catch them by using a Raspberry Pi to make a really cheap security camera.

Raspberry Pi Download Git

This is a quick post on how to download a git repository to a *nix machine - in this case a Raspberry Pi. I did it to get some cool code that my colleague had interneted/clouded to download to my Raspberry Pi.

Get Python IDLE to work on your Mac

An out of the box Mac comes with Python and a development environment called IDLE. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well e.g. raw_input() command causes it to hang and there are some other serious problems. Here's an alternative and a quick solution...

Mac Image Batch Processing with terminal

Have you got a pile of images you want to rotate or resize? You can do this really quickly on your Mac using built-in command line aka The Terminal in seconds.

Get started with Git: Cloning

Git is a software version control system.  It is good because you can use it in a distributed way keeping local and remote repositories kept in sync, with multiple developers strong project history and conflict resolution.

This post describes how to 'git going' with an existing project assuming you have already Set Up Git.  We create a local version of a project on github, make a small change and bounce that back to the github master.

Unhide Android Developer Options

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini with Android 4.2.2/Jellybean. I routinely use my phone for development purposes requiring access to Android Developer settings. Out of the box these options are hidden and you need to know how to reveal the options.

Go to Settings, More..., About Device. Tap on Build number 7 times.  You will get a little toast popup window letting you know developer options are enabled.  They can be accessed from the More... menu.