thethingbox.io image – testing and extending

I’ve started investigating the http://thethingbox.io/ image – they say ‘Just download and write a Raspberry-Pi binary file on a SD card to get it ready!’ Well, that’s mostly true – but I found a few issues once I logged on to it via ssh that I’ve documented here, mostly easy to fix once you know how.

So after booting from the card, I ssh’d into it – as root with a password of ‘raspberry’. I change this immediately:
passwd

set the locale, timezone and keyboard:
dpkg-reconfigure locales
echo 'Europe/London'>/etc/timezone && dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractice tzdata
dpkg-reconfigure console-data

Now some updates:
rpi-update
aptitude update
aptitude upgrade -y
aptitude install sudo

Follow the code in the first post here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=64843 for a recent copy of fsck.vfat to fix the errors on the boot partition.

I prefer to work as a normal user so I’ll create one
adduser pi

Answering various questions about the new user pi got me a home directory, then on to joining a few extra groups (not sure if all are needed, tbh!):
usermod -a -G pi,adm,dialout,cdrom,sudo,audio,video,plugdev,games,users,netdev pi

Finally change the hostname to ‘whateveryoucallyoursystem’ by changing the hostname and /etc/hosts files:
echo '127.0.1.1 whateveryoucallyoursystem'>>/etc/hosts
echo 'whateveryoucallyoursystem'>/etc/hostname

and reboot.

Now we can log in as normal user pi!

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