Raspberry Pi Adventures: Part 1

If you’ve followed many of my adventures before, you probably know that even when following closely to a tutorial, things don’t always go well for me.

I’m stubborn, I don’t always read everything and if something can go wrong it generally does.

I’ve wanted to get into using a Raspberry Pi and like any first-timer I thought “I KNOW I’LL MAKE A RETRO GAMING SYSTEM!” Did it with RetroPie because it was quick and easy. No problems. ROMs for days and unlimited game-age.

There was something missing though. I’m a developer, I’ve been in the command line, this felt too easy. I mean, here, in my hand is a whole computer. This is insane.

So I downloaded the latest version of Raspbian (Jessie) and got everything loaded up from my PC, onto the microSD and into the Raspberry Pi. Boot sequence, initiate!

Login…login? I’ve not even set this up and it’s asking for login credentials? A quick Google and by default (which all of your are already yelling at me about) the username is ‘pi’ and the password is ‘raspberry’.

Boom, I’m in. Command line, sweet.

Hopping around I see things are fairly similar to file systems that I’ve seen before. I went with just the default install with no GUI because again, I’m stubborn. So, let’s get that GUI installed! Oh, I have no internet connection. Right.

Instead of being connected with an ethernet cable, because why make it easy on myself, I’m just rolling with a WiFi dongle. No worries though, I know my network and password so it should be a cinch. Adafruit even has a nice tutorial of how to get that set up.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

INPUT: 

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
   wpa-ssid "ssid"
   wpa-psk "password"

Nano, cool, I got this. Followed the directions, go to press the double-quotations aaaaaand it’s a @. What? Yep that’s a @ symbol. Oh well, must be fine right? Ctrl + X, Y, Enter, back to the command line.

sudo reboot

Whirrrrrrrr, it reboots. Great, now I should be online.

ping google.com

Nope. Alright, so let’s revisit that network file. Hopping back in I tried my darndest to turn that @ into a ” but to no avail. Thankfully someone else had encountered this and noted that the two are basically switched on the keyboard. Alright Shift + 2 and there it is, finally, a double quote. Used that, saved, rebooted and heyyyyy pinging google actually returns a result. I’m now online. The sky is the limit. Now I can install absolutely anything I want without being tethered to an ethernet cable.

I’m sure there will be more mistakes and hiccups to come, so until then, see ya.

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John Hartley is a Director of Product Engineering at Beam Dental in Columbus, OH. With 7+ years of leadership experience he has worked in startups, agencies, and began his career as a freelance Front End Developer. Always looking to iterate, this blog is a place for him to share his knowledge as well as hone his craft, challenge assumptions, and build a strong base of leadership and management knowledge. Connect with him on LinkedIn

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