Pi 1

  Action begins pretty soon!! Apparently one of my seniors who is in M.Tech 1st year, invited me for the HACK DAY! Our main task list includes:

 1. Configuring the Pi
 2. Startup
 3. Installing Apache
 4. Webserver Configuration
 5. Testing


Since I was excited about the HACK DAY I was well prepared for it. Meaning I already downloaded the .img file of 'Raspbian Wheezy' distro for Raspberry Pi, and put all the necessary extensions which include USB Mouse, Keyboard, LAN wire, card reader, micro-usb charger [for powering the pi].

Configuring the Pi.

This was probably the easiest task of the all mentioned in the list above. I burned the .img file into my Micro USB card using PowerISO [oh, yes for this I use WINDOWS!! LORD SAVE ME :P].

Caution : While making a USB bootable drive, make sure your memory card has ample amount of space available. Since my basic task doesn't require me to use much space I used my old card having a total capacity of 4 GB.

After creating the bootable Card, I plugged in all the necessary hardware and started running the Pi. Now there are three small LED at the side of the Pi, The RED one denotes that the power is ON, just below that you'll see another LED with ACT written over it, well that tell you that your Pi is not activated and you are good to go. Apart from that there is another LED located which is a ETHERNET connection indicator.

After turning ON, the Pi takes some time to initialize.

During the first startup it'll ask for LOGIN ID AND PASSWORD. The default login id is 'pi' and default password is 'raspberry'.

Once you are logged in you need to start the 'startx' server which starts the graphical user interface in the Pi. For those who are well familiar with LINUX this won't be a problem.

STEP 2 :

Now next I turned on to configure the webserver on the Pi. My basic aim as of now is to install apache on the Pi's localhost. Well again, it's easy all I need to do was to shoot the following command

 $:apt-get install apache2 phpmyadmin mysql-server php5 php5-cli 

And VOILA!! without any further woes! I was able to install the Apache webserver.

And the most important of all, since I do not have the usb wifi dongle with me, I used connectify [windows platform] to connect Pi, to the internet using the ehternet port available on the Pi.

That's it for now. The next task is to access the Pi remotely and also to make a full fledged Pi cluster.

To reiterate my words from my first post yesterday, I HOPE WE'LL DO THIS IN THE GIVEN TIME FRAME.

Till the next time Adios!