Continued from here

First page here

8.  Installing a Bittorrent Client

I don’t know about you, but I want to install a Bittorrent client on your Pi, and I’ll tell you why.  If your PC uses a wireless router and you use Bittorrent, you will probably find that the Bittorrent traffic over your network utterly clobbers your PC’s connection, making the internet virtually unusable.  You also have to leave your PC on overnight when downloading large files, like Linux distributions or the many legal video torrents that exist.  Furthermore, once your torrent has finished, you have to leave the bandwidth-hogging Bittorrent program running in order to get any sort of honourable ratio.

Running a Bittorrent client on your Pi, plugged directly into the router, solves all these problems.  In fact, the whole setup is so unobtrusive that I’ve occasionally forgotten I’ve been seeding something and discovered I’ve worked up an enormous ratio.  Fnar fnar.  Sorry.  It also allows something else – you can log into your bittorrent client from any PC, even from outside your home network.  Say you are at work, browsing around at lunchtime, when you remember there is a perfectly legal film you want to watch this evening.  Logging in from your work’s PC, you can tell your Pi to start downloading it and by the time you get home, your film will be waiting for you.

So let’s find a Bittorrent client to install.  Shall we fire up Google?  No.  We don’t need to do that.  We can search the repository for Bittorrent clients using the “apt-cache” command like this: apt-cache search bittorrent client.  Note that you don’t need to sudo it because you aren’t installing anything yet.  The “apt-cache search” bit searches for whatever you put after it.

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ apt-cache search bittorrent client
apt-transport-debtorrent - an APT transport for communicating with DebTorrent
aria2 - High speed download utility
azureus - BitTorrent client
... loads and loads and loads ...
transmission - lightweight BitTorrent client
transmission-cli - lightweight BitTorrent client (command line programs)
transmission-common - lightweight BitTorrent client (common files)
transmission-daemon - lightweight BitTorrent client (daemon)
transmission-dbg - lightweight BitTorrent client (debug symbols)
transmission-gtk - lightweight BitTorrent client (GTK interface)
transmission-qt - lightweight BitTorrent client (Qt interface)
unworkable - efficient, simple and secure bittorrent client
vuze - Multimedia BitTorrent client
naich@raspberrypi ~ $

Spoiled for choice, aren’t we?  What we want is one that will happily do its own thing without any input from a human and doesn’t need a GUI.  In Linux, a program that runs in the background without requiring human interaction is called a “daemon”.  If you take a look at the list, two packages fit the bill – “deluged” and “transmission-daemon”.  We’ll use the latter.  Let’s download it, install it, set it up, and run it with 4 words: sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon.

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree 
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
 libcurl3-gnutls libminiupnpc5 libnatpmp1 minissdpd transmission-cli
 transmission-common
Suggested packages:
 natpmp-utils transmission-gtk
The following NEW packages will be installed:
 libcurl3-gnutls libminiupnpc5 libnatpmp1 minissdpd transmission-cli
 transmission-common transmission-daemon
0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1,905 kB of archives.
After this operation, 4,173 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Do you see all those dependencies that will be installed as well?  Apt is also suggesting other packages that aren’t needed but might be useful.  You want to continue.  Things going up the screen…  Done yet?  Did you notice this line?

[ ok ] Starting bittorrent daemon: transmission-daemon.

You are now running your bittorrent client.  It will automatically start up every time your Pi starts, so you don’t even have to remember to restart it when you reboot.  Isn’t that nice?  Come on – that is pretty cool isn’t it?

So let’s use it.  Transmission comes with a built in web server to use as an interface.  You use it by putting this into your browser: “http://your_pi’s_ip_address:9091″  – that’s a colon and 9091 after the address, no slashes.  You should see this:

403: Forbidden

Unauthorized IP Address.
Either disable the IP address whitelist or add your address to it.
If you’re editing settings.json, see the ‘rpc-whitelist’ and ‘rpc-whitelist-enabled’ entries.
If you’re still using ACLs, use a whitelist instead. See the transmission-daemon manpage for details.

This is correct.  As a general rule, installed packages will be set up in a safe way, so that nasty people (including you) can’t use it.  You will need to edit the configuration file to relax its security enough that you can use it.  Full instructions on how to do it are here: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/EditConfigFiles  but let’s just get it going quickly for now.  Transmission is a bit unusual in that it overwrites its configuration files when it exits.  This isn’t normal and caused me much confusion for a while because I’d edit the configuration, restart Transmission and it wouldn’t work because all my changes were overwritten.  So let’s stop Transmission before we edit the file with sudo service transmission-daemon stop:

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo service transmission-daemon stop
[ ok ] Stopping bittorrent daemon: transmission-daemon.
naich@raspberrypi ~ $

You can probably work out what is going on there.  Now edit the configuration file.  It’s in the “/etc” directory, (along with all the other configuration files), in its own directory.  If you want to find a configuration file for a daemon, look in “/etc” – it’ll be there, either in its own directory or as a file.  Type sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json:

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Now, move the cursor down until you find this part (without the numbers):

1 "rpc-authentication-required": true,
  "rpc-bind-address": "0.0.0.0",
  "rpc-enabled": true,
2 "rpc-password": "{1669ab9b7fdadc2a8a910abf75a60f6c584365e6oRs3weiW",
  "rpc-port": 9091,
  "rpc-url": "/transmission/",
3 "rpc-username": "transmission",
4 "rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1",
5 "rpc-whitelist-enabled": true,

“rpc” means “Remote Procedure Call” and refers to the web server.  Seems a bit odd to call it this as RPCs are generally from computers rather than humans, but what do I know?   When you make changes, make sure you preserve the punctuation: the quotes, colons and commas all need to be in their correct places.  Going through the numbers, leave the unmarked lines alone and change these ones to suit your preferred method of access:

1. If this is “true” (note that there are no quotes round the word in the config file) then you will be asked for a username and password before you can use the web pages.
2. This is the password you log in with if 1. is set to “true”.  The default is an impossible-to-guess huge random string.
3. The username you log in with if 1. is set to “true”.  Default is “transmission” and you should change it if you plan to use a username/password – default usernames are bad.
4. The comma-separated list of IP addresses that are allowed to use the web page.  A “*” means any number.  If your home network has addresses that all start “192.168…” then you could make this string “127.0.0.1,192.168.*.*” to make sure that only people in your home network can log in.  Leave the “127.0.0.1” in there, as this refers to the Pi itself.
5. If you set this to “false” then 4 is ignored and anyone can connect from any PC.

I’d recommend either:

• Set 1 to “false”, 5 to “true” and make sure that any PC you will access it from is included in the list at 4 or
• Set 1 to “true”, set the name/password in 2/3 and set 5. to “false”

The first one doesn’t require a password, but you will be restricted to logging in from only the PCs whose IP numbers are specifically set in 4.  The second allows you to access it from any PC in the world (make sure you set your router’s port forwarding so connections to port 9091 are sent to your Pi’s IP), but you need to have a username/password to stop any Tom, Richard or Harry using it.

Then start it up again with  sudo service transmission-daemon start:

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo service transmission-daemon start
[ ok ] Starting bittorrent daemon: transmission-daemon.
naich@raspberrypi ~ $

Point your web browser at http://your_pi’s_address:9091 and you should see something like this:

Continuing from here

First page here

7.  Updating your system

We’ve just got a spot of housekeeping to do before installing some stuff to turn your pi into something useful.  We are going to do a system update to make sure we are running the latest version of everything.  And I mean everything.  The update will not only update the operating system, but all your installed software.  All your Pi’s software comes from a “repository” on the internet of pre-compiled software packages, created by the people who made the Raspbian distribution – over 35,000 packages in total, covering pretty much anything you might want your Pi to do: web server, media server, media streamer, torrent client, DNS, web browser (yes, a text only web browser) and so on.  Each package contains software, configuration files, manual pages, and scripts needed to set the software up after install.  You can install packages from outside the repository or compile your own software, but that is a bit more advanced and everything we need is included in the Raspbian repository.

Software is maintained on a your Pi’s Debian-based Linux system, Raspbian, with a set of utilities called Apt, which is short for “Advanced Package Tool”.  It keeps a track of all the installed software packages, what version they are, if they need updating, and other packages required by each package.  That last one is important.  Most packages will rely on other packages being installed on your Pi in order to work.  From a programmer’s point of view, there is no point in re-inventing the wheel if you want a feature in your program (let’s call your program “Program A”) that has already been created by someone else in Program B.  The programmer can tell program A to call up Program B when this feature is needed.  Then, when the repository maintainer creates Program A’s package for the Raspbian repository, the maintainer adds a specification to the package that tells Apt to check that the package containing Program B is already installed on the Pi.  If it is then that’s fine and dandy, but if it’s not, Apt will nip off and download Program B’s package too.  Of course, it then has to check if the Program B’s package needs any other packages to be installed on the Pi, download them if they aren’t installed, check those ones…, and so on until all the packages are happy.  Keeping track of all these interlinking packages, each depending on the other (package B is called a “dependency” of package A), would be a nightmare to do yourself, so thank goodness for Apt, which does it all for you.

You might think that it sounds a bit complicated, but it’s not.  You will soon see how easy it all is to use.  Then you might start feeling sorry for Windows users and the pain they have to go through – finding the software, downloading it (Windows downloads are usually bigger as they don’t have Linux’s dependency system), going through the install procedure and then finding that the installer just splatted a load of crapware all over their PC.  Do not pity them though.  They have chosen their path.  It’s quite similar (and predates by many years) the “App” system used by Apple, Android etc., except it is far more flexible and doesn’t restrict you to one source of packages.

But back to the updating… Let’s start off by getting a list of software that needs updating.  Type sudo apt-get update and you should see something like this:

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get update 
Get:1 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy InRelease [12.5 kB] 
Get:2 http://archive.raspberrypi.org wheezy InRelease [7,698 B] 
Get:3 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/main armhf Packages [7,296 kB] 
... and so on for a bit... 
Ign http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/rpi Translation-en 
Fetched 7,388 kB in 48s (151 kB/s) 
Reading package lists... Done 
naich@raspberrypi ~ $

Lovely jubbly.  It’s got a list of all the latest packages.  Let’s process all the packages that need upgrading to a later version.  Type sudo apt-get upgrade:

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get upgrade 
Reading package lists... Done 
Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 

The following packages will be upgraded: 
bash dictionaries-common file idle3 krb5-locales libgssapi-krb5-2 
libk5crypto3 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 liblapack3 liblapack3gf 
libmagic1 libpulse0 libsystemd-login0 libtiff4 libxapian-dev libxapian22 
libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libxslt1.1 nfs-common omxplayer 
python3 python3-minimal tasksel tasksel-data udisks vim-common vim-tiny 
xserver-common xserver-xorg-core 

32 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 
Need to get 23.0 MB of archives. 
After this operation, 1,183 kB of additional disk space will be used. 
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Do you want to continue?  You do.  And away it goes, upgrading it’s little silicon heart out.  Very rarely, you might see something like this:

Configuration file `/etc/skel/.bashrc'
 ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
 ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
 What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
 Y or I : install the package maintainer's version
 N or O : keep your currently-installed version
 D : show the differences between the versions
 Z : start a shell to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** .bashrc (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?

This means that Apt has found a configuration file that been changed since the package was installed.  Unless you have made the change yourself, it’s safest to choose “Y” to install the new version which will be compatible with the updated software. A backup of the old config file will be saved in case the new one doesn’t work so you can examine them later to see the differences and fix them if necessary.

Warnings can generally be ignored.  Things like this probably don’t mean much to you:

insserv: warning: current start runlevel(s) (empty) of script `nfs-common' overwrites defaults (2 3 4 5 S).
insserv: warning: current stop runlevel(s) (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 S) of script `nfs-common' overwrites defaults (0 1 6).

And to be honest it doesn’t mean that much to me either.  It looks like it’s saying that the nfs server isn’t automatically started on runlevels 2-5 any more.  Possibly.  We aren’t using nfs so we don’t care; we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.  My Pi seemed to work OK after those warnings, so I didn’t worry about them.  Make a note of warnings, just in case you need to find a problem later, but don’t worry about them unduly.  “warning: ” means something unexpected has happened but Apt can keep going.  Errors, however, can’t be ignored.  “error: ” means something so bad has happened that Apt can’t continue.  If you ever see an error, the best thing to do is to copy and paste it into Google to find someone else who has had the same problem and has hopefully fixed it.

You want to go through this procedure (“apt-get update” followed by “apt-get upgrade”) every now and again to make sure your system is up to date.  Most updates are due to bugs regarding security and are closing avenues of attack for hackers, so you want to install them.  I do it about once a week.

There is also another type of upgrade – apt-get dist-upgrade. This upgrades your system to the latest stable release.  This means that it won’t just upgrade your packages for bug fixes and security patches, it will upgrade all your software to the version included in the current stable release of your distribution, as if you downloaded and installed it from scratch.  This is a more serious upgrade and should only be undertaken if you’ve got a bit of spare time to fix anything that might get broken.  You are likely to see those messages about the configuration files and might have to edit upgraded ones to get things working again.  If you start seeing messages during your “apt-get upgrade” that packages have been “held back”, it means that you should probably start thinking about doing a “dist-upgrade”.

Continued here…

Continued from here

First page here.

6.  Creating a user

Now you are starting to get to know your Pi, you’ll want to start making it feel more like home.  Unless your name is “Pi” you will want to add yourself as a user.  Type this:

adduser naich

Do I really need to explain that you should replace “naich” with your name?  If you’ve already guessed that and typed it in with your name, you will probably be slightly worried at this point because it will have replied “adduser: Only root may add a user or group to the system.”

“Root” is the name of the account that has full access to the Linux system.  There are many things that only Root can do, and it’s just as well really; one of the things that only root can do is permanently delete the entire filesystem with one command that doesn’t even bring up an “Are you sure?” type question.  As an ordinary user, you can only screw up your own stuff that you put on there, but as root you are a god that can break everything for everyone forever.  This is why we try to avoid being root as much as possible.  Luckily the root password does not actually exist, so you can never log on as root!  Problem solved, except that sometimes we do want to be able to do rooty stuff, like add users.  There is a way to temporarily become root and that way is sudo.  You might remember typing it in earlier.  Sudo executes a command with root privileges and you simply add “sudo” in front of the command you want to run like this: sudo adduser naich:

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo adduser naich
Adding user `naich' ...
Adding new group `naich' (1000) ...
Adding new user `naich' (1000) with group `naich' ...
Creating home directory `/home/naich' ...
Copying files from `/etc/skel' ...
Enter new UNIX password:

Choose a good password for your username but one you will remember.  Write it down if you have to.  Fill in the rest of the details or leave them blank if you want.  You also need to add your new user to the list of people who can use sudo, so type sudo visudo and you should see this:

#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of
# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults        env_reset
Defaults        mail_badpass
Defaults        secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:$
... and so on ...

“visudo” is the command that allows you to modify the list, “sudo” means you are temporarily granted root’s super powers in order to do so.  What visudo actually does is load a text file into an editor called “nano”.  Once nano has loaded the sudoers list, move the cursor down to where it says

pi  ALL=ALL(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

and change “pi” to your new username.  This means “pi” will no longer be able to sudo, but that doesn’t matter because we are going to delete him soon anyway.  To save the changes and exit nano, press CTRL-X.  If you want to exit without saving your changes press N at the prompt, otherwise press Y and then hit return to save it with the suggested name.  You’ll be using nano a bit, as most configuration is done with plain text files.

Once you have got back to the “pi@raspberrypi:~$” prompt, type exit to log out and log back in again as you.

6.1 A Windows diversion

Windows users: this is the part where we sort out the static IP stuff.  Linux users can skip this bit and go to section 6.2.

You now need to edit two files – the /etc/network/interfaces file that you couldn’t edit earlier, and the /boot/cmdline.txt file to take out the stuff you put in earlier.  Type sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces and use the text editor (in the same manner as you did to edit the sudoers file) to edit the file as described in section 3 (click to open in a new window/tab).  Save it with CTRL-X, [Y]es, Enter and then type sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt and remove all the text after “rootwait” that you put in earlier.  Make sure the text is still all on one line and that there is still a newline at the end of the line.  Save the file.  Your Pi is now properly configured with a static IP.

6.2 Back to our scheduled programming

Now let’s kill off “pi”.  If you add users with the command “adduser”, you might think you delete them with “deluser”, right?  Nope, it’s userdel.  No idea why.  As a general rule, if you don’t know what command to use, a good place to start is Google – “linux delete user”, returns 205 million pages telling you how to do it.  Anyway, have a go at deleting pi.  I’m not going to tell you how to do it.  See if you can guess.

Done it?  It was sudo userdel pi, by the way.  Do you like the way it didn’t ask if you really wanted to do that?  Linux assumes you know what you are doing and doesn’t treat you like an idiot by asking you if you really want to do something.  Successful operations for simple things (like copying, moving and deleting files, for example), generally won’t produce any output unless you tell them to.

If you don’t know how to navigate the Linux filesystem, now is the time to check out Appendix B and learn all about it.  Got it?  Go to the home directory – cd /home  and have a look – ls :

naich@raspberrypi ~ $ cd /home
naich@raspberrypi /home $ ls
naich  pi
naich@raspberrypi /home $

As well as your new user’s directory, there is also one called “pi”.  Although you deleted the user pi you didn’t delete his stuff.  You don’t need or want it, so get rid of it.  Type sudo rm -r pi (“rm is short for “remove”),… and it’s gone.  As before, there are no prompts, no “are you sure?”s; it’s gone forever.  If this doesn’t make you a little uneasy, then you might not have grasped how devastating a mistake could be and will probably discover this the hard way at some point!

Before you go any further, please consider expanding your knowledge about commands  a bit by reading appendix C.  You don’t have to but it might help you understand what’s going on a bit more.  See if you can find out what the “-r” does when you types sudo rm -r pi earlier.

Continued here…