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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.

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

Compiling the latest version of aria2 download manager on Raspberry Pi

Installing and Configuring MiniDLNA Server On Raspberry Pi

We have already setupped the Raspberry Pi to download files from internet and share them wirelessly over network acting as an NAS. Now it's time to further enhance this functionality to share multimedia content (audio/video/images) using DLNA protocol so our Raspberry Pi can act as an self contained multimedia downloader and server.

Enabling DLNA allows compatible networked device like TV's, cellphones, music systems and computers to enable seamless sharing and playback of digital media between devices. DLNA uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) for media management, discovery and control. Follow the instructions ahead to install and configure popular Linux DLNA server utility MiniDLNA on Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.

DLNA server detected by Sony Bravia

aria2 - The Best Lightweight, Multi-protocol, Multi-source Download Accelerator For Linux

In search for the most stable yet low resource consuming download accelerator for my Raspberry Pi NAS, we have tested and written about excellent utilities like Transmission Bittorrent Client, pyLoad and FatRat which gets the job done. However, after extensive testing with all these I can now easily conclude that the best download manager for Raspberry Pi (or any other low-resourced Linux computer) is - aria2.

aria2 is an versatile multi-platform, multi-protocol download accelerator with lots of powerful features not available in any of the competing applications like the ability to download the same file from multiple URLS and protocols. Aria2 is available for Linux, Windows and Mac and supports multi-protocol, multi-segmented parallel accelerated downloads from HTTP,HTTPS,FTP,BitTorrent and Metalink protocols with download resume capability. Despite being a lightweight command line utility, you won't feel the lack of an GUI as it supports an XML-RPC interface for remote-control - there are quite a few handy GUI's available like web-interfaces, desktop clients and native mobile applications.

aria2

Autostarting Applications and Scripts After Launch Of LXDE GUI

We can launch applications and scripts as services during boot at various Linux run-levels as demonstrated earlier, however at-times we need to launch applications or perform scripted tasks only after the Graphical interface is loaded. For example in my usage scenario with Debian running on a Raspberry Pi, few services were failing to work as expected when launched using inti.d method as they require the host to be properly connected to the internet which only happened (in my usage scenario) after the GUI started loading.

Here is another handy way to auto-launch applications and scripts in a similar manner to "autostart" in Windows, we will be using LXDE "/home/pi/.config/autostart" folder to create shortcuts which will launch our executable after GUI starts loading.

LXDE autostart

Launching Scripts and Applications on Raspberry Pi Boot

Users world-over are tweaking there way into Raspberry Pi making multitudes of things, like low energy consuming dedicated downloader, media center, Network Attached File-server (NAS), weather station, home-automation and robotics. To do all this tinkering, you will frequently need to make sure applications are launched when the Raspberry Pi is restarted.

Follow this simple tutorial to create services which will automatically launch at Debian boot. We will be using the Linux standard init.d method to launch our applications as services during various run-levels.

init.d folder
This is just one of the many helpful tips we have posted, You can find more stories here,
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