This covers only the basic install and configuration for future reference. More info on Privoxy can be found on their website http://www.privoxy.org/.

Install

apt-get install tor privoxy

vim /etc/privoxy/config

uncomment the following line:

forward-socks5 / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

If you need to browse internal hosts while connected:

forward 10.*.*.*/

Browser Configuration

Firefox: FoxyProxy
Chromium: Proxy Switchy

Documentation: http://www.privoxy.org/faq/misc.html#TOR

I have been watching progress on FreedomBox ever since watching a video of Eben Moglen a few years ago.

Turns out that that they recently announced the availability of their 0.1 preview release. As part of this there is one component that is extremely useful for RaspberryPi users (funnily the co-founder of RasperryPi is also called Eblen by first name – go figure) out there concerned about increasing snooping of private information by governments and corporations for a variety of reasons.

By default OpenVPN only routes traffic to and from the OpenVPN Server. If you need all traffic from a client through the OpenVPN tunnel there are several options listed in the OpenVPN docs (http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html#redirect). Since I don’t have any control over the server in some cases I needed a client side solution. As I already have ufw running with Ubuntu I wanted to use the existing software.

Here is how to configure ufw to enable routing all traffic from your client machines through the OpenVPN Server.

The ability to connect Android 4.+ devices to Ubuntu using the USB Mass Storage interface has always been a pain. With Ubuntu 13.04 a new MTP back-end (gvfs-mtp) is going to be introduced, but I have had some issues with the 13.04 Beta so I found this backport PPA to Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:langdalepl/gvfs-mtp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gvfs
sudo apt-get upgrade

Kudos to Phillip Langdale for the work and maintaining the PPA !

Turns out that the Broadcom BCM2708 chip on the RPi has a hardware watchdog. This can be very useful if your RPi is located remotely and locks up. However, this would not the preferred method of restarting the unit and in extreme cases this can result in file-system damage that could prevent the RPi from booting. If this occurs regularly you better find the root cause of the problem rather than fight the symptoms.

Testing the RPi for some remote sensing application I needed to use a wireless connection as it would have been a pain to reach with an Ethernet cable.

Parts

• Raspberry Pi Series B 512MB
• Raspbian 3.6.11+ Kernel
• Comfast 802.11n – Realtek RTL8188CUS WLAN Adapter

Install WPA Supplicant

sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wpa_supplicant

Check for the USB adapter

sudo lsusb

This should show output similar to this (depending on your USB adapter)

My normal combination on the big-server side would be Apache + MySQL (or PostgreSQL), but on the RPi this seems to be absolute overkill. For data-logging operations I would not use the local system anyway (looking at MQTT as well as Remote MongoDB datastore via REST Webservices).

After some poking around and reading up on the options I decided to go for the following combo: LightHTTPD + SQLite. Both are lightweight replacement of their fully-featured big-server counterparts (Apache HTTP & MySQL) and have very familiar configurations. There would be other options that have even less resource usage, but I really don’t have the time to start from scratch somewhere.

Just got myself (actually it’s for our Office Manager back in OZ) one of these Chromebooks while in Europe (since Google Australia with their absolutely hopeless hardware strategy do not seem to be able to ship any devices – Nexus 4 anyone ?) .

Since the first days turned out to be a bit of a frustrating experience, I thought I share some of the findings as I had a hard time finding much useful info on troubleshooting ChromeOS.

The Raspbian Install process is fairly well documented using the Raspbian Installer. This is just to document common tasks after the stock install.

Install base utils

apt-get install sudo vim ntpdate git-core binutils make gcc ca-certificates rpi-update

Allow non-root user account access to ‘sudo’

adduser USERNAME sudo

For those Ubuntu users there is no ‘admin’ group in Raspbian (Debian Wheezy).

NTP time update

sudo rm /etc/localtime
sudo ln -s  /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Adelaide /etc/localtime
sudo ntpdate -u au.pool.ntp.org

Probably best to choose an NTP Server closest to your location or provided by your ISP

Add apt repository key

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 7F0CEB10

Add apt repository

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/10gen.list
#add the following line:
deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen

Install mongodb & python utils

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-10gen python-pip python-dev build-essential
pip install pymongo

To connect 1-wire serial devices to the RPi I am using a DS9490R USB 1-wire adapter (rather than wiring I2C 1-Wire master components to GPIO I2C – which I might look at sometime down the track)

Install packages

sudo apt-get install owfs ow-shell

Edit config file

vim /etc/owfs.conf

! server: server = localhost:4304
# USB device: DS9490
server: usb = all
######################### OWFS ##########################
mountpoint = /mnt/1wire
allow_other
####################### OWHTTPD #########################
http: port = 2121
####################### OWFTPD ##########################
ftp: port = 2120
####################### OWSERVER ########################
server: port = localhost:4304

Create Startup Script

I created a startup script for owfs modelled on the owserver script (not sure why this one is actually missing)

Since I didn’t have any luck playing videos on the RPi using mplayer I found omxplayer after some search. It has the ability to use the RPi’s GPU thus taking some load of the CPU.

UPDATE 2013-04-01: omxplayer is now included in the Raspbian (Debian Wheezy) repositories and can be simply installed by one line.

sudo apt-get install omxplayer

Check another article on how to install Raspbian.