Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The second reason is that of stealth and secrecy. Usually, we want to be able to hide
our Pi with as few wires running to and fro as possible. Obviously, a Pi hidden in
a room becomes a lot more visible if someone trips over a connected monitor or
keyboard. This is why we make sure all our pranks can be controlled and triggered
from a remote location.
Keeping your system up-to-date
A community effort such as Raspbian and the Debian distribution on which it is based
is constantly being worked on and improved by hundreds of developers every day.
All of them are trying hard to make the Pi run as smoothly as possible, support as
many different peripherals as possible, and to squish any discovered software bugs.
All those improvements come to you in the form of package and firmware
updates. To keep your Raspbian OS up to date, you need to know the following
three commands:
•
sudo apt-get update
: This fetches information about what packages have
been updated.
•
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
: This proceeds to install the updated
packages. Select
Yes
when prompted for installation.
•
sudo rpi-update
: This upgrades to the latest firmware from the
Raspberry Pi Foundation's
GitHub repository
(an online source code
management service).
The firmware updates are more related to the Raspberry Pi hardware and may
contain improvements to the Linux kernel, new drivers for USB gadgets, or system
stability fixes.
Backing up your SD card
It happens to everyone at one point or another—you've put hours into perfecting
your Raspbian installation, setting up applications, and hacking away at clever code
when out of nowhere your cat/dog/next-of-kin swoops down on your keyboard and
triggers the self-destruct mechanism from the
Erasing the Pi should it fall into the wrong
hands
section in
Chapter 5
,
Taking Your Pi Off-road
.
Not to worry Agent, backing up an SD card is quite simple as long as you've got the
required disk space to store it.
