JEDIJF

Friday, July 6, 2012

Hiveberry Pi!

Sunday, we had a little Linux meetup at Hive76. This is how it went:


Ben, and everyone, awesome *first* meeting. Welcome all newcomers to
Hive76, I really hope you come around to open houses and let the rest
of the members meet you!

While playing with the Rasberry Pi we did some stuff that was very
Linux'y, but did it rather quickly to get the Pi running.

I will recap some of the things we did, and break down how they apply
to using Linux in an everyday situation:

1) dd - we used to make a bit for bit copy of an iso to a card to boot the R pi.

2) Getting sound to work, we covered many things quickly:

     a) alsamixer - a sound control app for alsa   (it wasn't
installed in the distro), so you would    think: sudo apt-get install
alsamixer (for Debian based distros)

      BUT that returns E: Couldn't find package alsamixer

      WHY? because alsamixer is an app, part of a larger *package* of apps

      HOW TO FIND? (**Debian based distos**)
               i) apt-cache search alsamixer
              ii) apt-file   (has to be installed and updated;
contains all files available in repos for local
                                 searching)
             iii) web based search of distro's packages

   b) Still no worky  *wonk wonk*  But why Mommy? So we tried aplay -l
 (which lists sound
       devices on system)

        1) returned nada zippo zero. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? It means
there is no module
            installed for the device

            HOW DO WE FIND module info? device info? *HELP* I'm drowning........

            i) module commands  - lsmod (list modules in use) modinfo
(list specific info for mod
                parameters, etc.) modprobe (install module) rmmod
(remove module)

            ii) device info - lshw (list hardware all) lsusb (list usb
devices) lspci (list pci devices) ETC
                *add* -v or more v's for more info (verbosity)
                Google - DDG - internet search  device and module info
can usually be found too.

   c) modprobe snd-bcm2835 (installs proper module)

   d) aplay -l again to see if it worked - SUCCESS

   e) alsamixer again to make sure nothing is muted - PCM must not be
muted and must be up
       (others too on different systems, but PCM is a big fail point)

   f) OMG SOUND

   g) next boot, have to modprobe again or no sound or add module to
/etc/modules to have it
       install automagically at every boot.

WOW - we did all that - YEP, and most of it can be applied to any
device that isn't recognized automagically for your Debian based
system - wireless stuff - anything.

Happy Hacking!