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Raspberry Pi

How To Take Hot Backup Of Raspberry Pi Without Removing The SD Card

Since we are supposed to do a lot of tweaking and tinkering with our Raspberry Pi installations, it is always a good idea to backup the working SD card image before venturing for any experimentation. One way to do this is to take the whole SD card out and use another Windows/Mac computer to backup and restore the full sd-card image as demonstrated earlier. To save you with this much hassle, here we are with another method to perform automated "hot backups" from a Raspberry Pi itself to an external USB disk drive or remote storage. Simply use the provided Shell script and enjoy fast, efficient and automated RPi backups.

Automated Raspberry Pi Backup Script

Easy To Understand Raspberry Pi GPIO Pin Layout Diagram

One of the major strength and a reason for Raspberry Pi success has been the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) access offered by the mini computer, these programmable in/out pins allows a great of hackability letting users expand the system and get it interacting with other hardware devices. The GPIO pin's are confusing as they are not numbered serially, here are two nice RasPi GPIO pinout layouts for making things easier to understand.

Raspberry Pi GPIO Pin Layout (Revision 1 Board)
RPi GPIO Pin Access

Raspberry Pi Recovery System (New Out Of Box Software - NOOBS) is here to help you get started...

Making life easier for Raspberry Pi users, the core team has announced a new, feature packed "Raspberry Pi Recovery System" aptly named New Out Of Box Software (NOOBS). The utility allows users to select and install operating systems for the Raspberry Pi on an SD card without technical details like partitioning or card imaging.

The Recovery system creates a FAT partition on user supplied SD card with highly-compressed versions of various supported OS images like Raspbian, RaspBMC, Pidora, OpenELEC, ArchLinux and RiscOS. Just like recovery apps for Mac OS X the RasPi recovery allows users to press SHIFT while booting to launch it and use features like ability to easily reinstall the existing OS, install a different one, launch web-browser for online support or edit config.txt file using a handy editor for troubleshooting.

NOOBS main windows

Better Performing Wayland Windowing Software Bypasses XServer Completely On Raspberry Pi For Smoother User Interface

Many Linux distributions including the official Debian based Rasbian distro for Raspberry Pi makes uses of X11 or XServer windowing software to render the user interface, the problem is X11 is not optimized to use the graphics core of RasPi efficiently resulting in degraded lagged window composition. The Raspberry Pi core team has now decided to bypass X11 completely and move over to the open-source Wayland composition protocol.

The overall results are really exciting, while still in development the team prepared a video demonstration comparing the two and results are really promising. The video comparison and links to details including how to install the technology preview on Raspbian are shared below (click Read more).

Wayland Windowing Software

Pidora - Fedora Remix Optimized For Raspberry Pi Now Available For Download

While users can easily install and use multiple operating-systems on Raspberry Pi using BerryBoot, the beauty of an removable media card as operating-system loader is the simple plug-n-boot ease of use. The official Debian Linux port is the most widely used and supported distribution for Raspberry Pi, but specialized OS like RasPlex, Xbian and Raspbmc are also available for download with more and more Linux distributions getting ported for the platform by the developer community. Adding another excellent addition to the ever growing list of dedicated, RPi optimized builds of various Linux distributions; Fedora joined the club with release of Pidora - a Fedora Remix optimized build for the Raspberry Pi computer.

Pidora is an RPi optimized build of Fedora (Fedora Remix) featuring software packages from the Fedora Project compiled specifically for the ARMv6 architecture for use on the Raspberry Pi. Unique features of this build are Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi), Compact initial image size with auto-resize for maximum storage afterwards, unique feature allowing IP address information readable over speakers and flashed with the LED light for true headless mode on setups lacking a monitor or display, easy package management using Yum, included support for programming languages (like C, Python, & Perl) and libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI) out-of-the-box.

pidora Fedora Remix Installer For ARM

Installing Raspi Config On Kali Linux

Kali Linux the new version of popular advanced penetration testing and security auditing Linux distribution Backtrack is now available as an ready to flash official image for Raspberry Pi. The convergence of portable mini computing power of Raspberry Pi and 300+ open-source penetration testing tools provided by Kali Linux makes them a killer combination. We have already seen how raspi-config utility proves to be a must have tool for essential tweaks to Raspberry Pi, sadly installing and using the same on Kali Linux requires some extra bit of efforts as shown ahead.

Kali Linux

How to install and use Unrar on Raspberry Pi running Debian

Decompressing RAR achieves is one basic functionality one would need on there Raspberry Pi mini-computer, while users can always download and install unrar-nonfree package from aptitude using apt-get install unrar-free, a better solution is to download and install unrar 4.1.4. Sadly, Unrar 4.1 is not available as a package in the RasPi repo. However, users can still download and install it using the following commands :

How to fix unbootable Raspberry Pi after rpi-update

rpi-update is an excellent utility to get all the latest updates and patches for your Raspberry Pi Debian operating-system. But being a utility which downloads and installs all the latest, cutting-edge core OS components it can mess things at times. A recent bad core-patch made Raspberry Pi unbootable for many, after downloading all the files successfully the RPi will fail to boot with the red LED on and green LED flashing 3 times telling a problem with boot files.

How to power Raspberry Pi over Ethernet

The small, cheap, hacker friendly, internet-connected Raspberry Pi mini-computer is a perfect choice for numerous electronic projects, and one desirable factor for such an assembly is to have minimum clutter. The IEEE standard of Power over Ethernet (PoE) lets user shoot two goals with a single solution, provide internet connectivity and power over a single Ethernet cable. The new Xtronix Raspberry Pi Power Over Ethernet (PoE) Adapter achieves exactly the same by providing +5 Volts at up to 1 Amp to the Raspberry Pi over the standards compliant IEEE 802.3af POE specification. The add-on adapter plugs directly on to the Raspberry Pi GPIO, and is available for order via eBay now. Demonstration video and buy link posted at the end of this post.

RasPlex - The Plex Home Theater port for the Raspberry Pi mini computer

DLNA is a widely used, popular media sharing protocol for instant multimedia sharing across devices irrespective of the hardware/software platform they are running. To get DLNA working we need a server, which catalogs and serves the multimedia content for consumption, while a client consumes the content supplied by the DLNA server. MiniDLNA is a fast, simple to configure and easy to use DLNA server which can be installed in minutes on the Raspberry Pi, however it has limited features.

RasPlex Logo

Plex Media Server is yet another powerful DLNA multimedia server, the good news is - we now have a working Raspberry Pi port of Plex home theater as RasPlex. RasPlex enables users to enjoy multimedia content across every DLNA capable client on their home network, utilizing the Plex Media Server's friendly user interface.

RasPlex
This is just one of the many helpful tips we have posted, You can find more stories here,
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