Something to do at lunchtime to get you more familiar with Linux, create a barebones Arch Linux VM. Taken from this article at Lifehacker I've compressed it into the following steps.

1. Download image from https://www.archlinux.org/
2. Partition hard drives /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 with GParted as ext 4
3. Boot from ISO and check, setup network https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide#Wired
4. Mount partitions mount /dev/sda1 /mnt ; mkdir /mnt/home; mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/home
5. mkswap /dev/sda3 ; swapon /dev/sda3
6. Edit Mirror List vi /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
7. Install base pacstrap -i /mnt base
8. genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
9. arch-chroot /mnt
10. nano /etc/locale.gen
11. echo LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
12. export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
13. ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime
14. hwclock --systohc --utc
15. systemctl enable dhcpcd@eth0.service
16. passwd
17. useradd -m -g users -G wheel,storage,power -s /bin/bash alastair
18. passwd alastair
19. pacman -S sudo
20. visudo to uncomment wheel group sudo access
21. pacman -S grub-bios
22. grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda
23. grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
24. exit, unmount, reboot
25. sudo pacman -S alsa-utils
26. alsamixer ; speaker-test -c 2
27. pacman -S xf86-video-vesa
28. pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-server-utils xorg-twm xorg-xclock xterm
29. sudo pacman -S ttf-dejavu
30. pacman -S xfce4 xfce4-goodies
31. systemctl disable fam.service
32. pacman -Rd fam
33. pacman -S gamin
34. cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc ~/.xinitrc ; vi .xinitrc
35. pacman -S openssh
36. startx

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Installed the clean looking Chalk Theme on my Tiny Tiny RSS server running on my Raspberry Pi.




Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Running Tiny Tiny RSS News Feed reader on my Raspberry Pi.

Setup on Lighttpd and MySQL using the instructions on http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki as a replacement to Google Reader.

Working well so far.

I've finally got my Piwigo instance running on my Raspberry Pi live to the internet http://alastairhm.no-ip.org/piwigo/



It is running on Lighttpd and mySQL.

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Installed the gallery software Piwigo on my Raspberry Pi, screenshots below.

After installing lighttpd and MySQL5 and the other prerequisites you can install it using

sudo apt-get install piwigo

Although this is an older version, if you want the latest you'll need to go through the manual installation route which is detailed on their web page.

On my Ubuntu desktop, I did a trial run updating the version installed with apt-get using the Piwigo's internal upgrade option but this failed so might not be a viable option. More upgrade information here.




Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Finally got round to playing a bit more with my Raspberry Pi, got Lighttpd installed on it, just a case of running;

               sudo apt-get install lighttpd

Although I had to create the www-data group manually before this would install successfully.
More details can be found on



Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Short script to send Twitter mention messages to a serial port using Ruby and the gems twitter and serialport.

# Find your Twitter Mentions and send them to Arduino on Serial Port
require “rubygems”
require “twitter” #https://github.com/sferik/twitter for config details
require “serialport” #http://rubygems.org/gems/serialport
require “pp”
prevID = 0
puts “Setting Up Serial Port”
myport = SerialPort.new("/dev/ttyACM0",“9600”.to_i)
sleep(10)
while true
puts “Checking for mentions”
latestMention = Twitter.mentions(:count => 1)[0]
if prevID != latestMention.id
msg = latestMention.user.screen_name + " " + latestMention.text
puts “-” + msg
bytes = myport.write(msg)
puts “-” + bytes.to_s
prevID = latestMention.id
else
puts “-No new updates”
end
sleep 60
end
myport.close

Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Got my Arduino LCD message scroller working last night, will post a video later when I do an end to end test with my Twitter mentions.

Here is the code (also at GitHub https://github.com/alastairhm/arduino.git)

// Auto scroll a message on the LCD and receive new messages via Serial port.
// Alastair Montgomery (c) 2013
// Version 1.02
 
// include the library code:
#include <LiquidCrystal.h>
#include <string.h>
// initialize the library with the numbers of the interface pins
// below for SainSmart LCD Shield
LiquidCrystal lcd(8, 9, 4, 5, 6, 7);