Revision as of 13:52, 1 August 2017

The xPL protocol is light enough to run on simple machines such as the Raspberry Pi.

Install Raspbian

Several distributions are available for the Raspberry Pi. This wiki bases on the console version of Raspbian.

Prepare an SD card

On a Linux computer, download it:

su
cd /tmp
wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest
mv raspbian_lite_latest raspbian_lite.zip
unzip raspbian_lite.zip
mv *-raspbian-*-lite.img raspbian-lite.img

Insert a card reader with the SD card you wish to use and write the image:

fdisk -l
RPI_DISK='/dev/sdb'
umount $RPI_DISK*
dd if=raspbian-lite.img of=$RPI_DISK

With GPartEd, add a 1 GB partition for the swap and format the rest of the card as ext4 for the user data.

Eject the SD card reader.

Change root password

Insert the SD card in the Raspberry Pi and boot it.

sudo su
passwd
apt-get update

Swap space

Create a swap file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
chmod 600 /root/swapfile
mkswap /root/swapfile

Enable the swapfile:

swapon /root/swapfile
swapon -s
free -k

To enable at reboot, edit /etc/fstab:

/root/swapfile    swap    swap    defaults    0 0

Locales

Install locales (for PERL and others):

su
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

Then edit ~.bashrc and add:

export LC_ALL=C

Ethernet

Check the Ethernet connection:

ifconfig | grep inet
ping google.com

Connect to the BeagleBone via SSH to continue working (on a larger window).

ssh root@192.168.1.165

Change host name:

nano /etc/hosts
  change: "127.0.1.1 ubuntu-armhf" to: "127.0.1.1 beagleBoneHostname"
nano /etc/hostname

Set up a bonjour discovery:

apt-get install avahi-daemon libnss-mdns

Give a static address:

nano /etc/network/interfaces
iface eth0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.14
  gateway 192.168.1.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1
/etc/init.d/networking restart

Set-up Apple FileProtocol (AFP) sharing:

apt-get install netatalk
nano /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

Command-line editing

Enable history search and bash tab autocompletion:

nano .bashrc
nano /etc/inputrc
apt-get update && apt-get install bash-completion

Install manuals:

apt-get install man-db

Programming tools

Install compilation tools (make, gcc, …):

apt-get install build-essential

Install Perl documentation reader:

apt-get install perl-doc

Local time

Set local time:

ls -lr /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/
rm /etc/localtime
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Zurich /etc/localtime

Update time on a daily basis with the help of the script /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate containing:

#!/bin/sh
ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com

Make the script executable:

chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate

Control user

Create user

Add the control user:

useradd -m -g users -G users,dialout,audio -s /bin/bash control
passwd control

Checks

CPU usage

Check CPU usage:

ps -eo pcpu,user,args | sort -k 1 -r | head -10
echo && ps -eo pcpu,user,args | grep -v ' 0.0 ' | grep -v '%CPU' | sort -k 1 -r | sed 's/[ ^I]\/.*\/perl//' | sed 's/.pl[ ^I].*/.pl/'

Process priorities

Check process priorities:

ps ax -o nice,pid,user,args | grep -v ' NI ' | sort

The lowest numbers correspond to the highest priorities.

Change the priority level of xPL devices:

ps ax -o nice,pid,user,args | grep -v ' grep ' | grep -i xpl-

USER='control'
NEW_LEVEL=-10
SYSTEM_IFS=$IFS; IFS=$'\n'; 
task_list=(`ps ax -o pid,user,args | grep -v ' grep ' | grep -i '/xpl-'`)
IFS=$SYSTEM_IFS
for item in "${task_list[@]}" ;  do
  task_id=`echo "${item}" | sed "s/$USER.*//"`
# echo $task_id
  renice $NEW_LEVEL -p $task_id >/dev/null
done
ps ax -o nice,pid,user,args | grep -v ' grep ' | grep -i xpl-

Upstart daemons

Check the status of init daemons:

initctl list
initctl list | grep xpl-

Links

Here some interesting pages for the installation process:

• create a robust Raspberry Pi setup for 24x7 operation