Packed with recipes for the Banana Pi, solving the most common real-world problems, viewers get a practical assistance to avoid difficulties.
Full of supportive guides, this book is designed to help you build and expand your device into a versatile box. Any computer enthusiast can quickly learn how to become a Banana Pi expert, while not requiring skills in programming or Linux. Banana Pi Cookbook will allow you to use the technology start from the very beginning, through the daily usage and maintenance, up to setting up a WordPress from scratch, sharing files using Samba or ownCloud, blinking an LED, or playing 1080p videos.
Chapter 1, Installation and Setup, introduces the Banana Pi device. It also explains which distributions are available and how to download and install a Linux distribution. Moreover, we present Android as a contrast to our upcoming Linux adventure.
Chapter 2, Administration, introduces the reader to the most common tools to administrate their fresh Linux installation. We will connect remotely using SSH from Windows (using PuTTY) and Linux (using the command-line SSH application). Besides user modification (adding a new user, changing passwords, and so on), we will also cover basic maintenance tasks, such as searching and installing a new software, updating the system using the distributions package manager, and so on.
Chapter 3, External Disks, covers all about external disk drives. We will connect and mount USB drives and HDD drives using the SATA interface and explore the possibility of switching the root filesystem to and boot from an external drive.
Chapter 4, Networking, presents recipes for common networking tasks using the Banana Pi. One of the key strengths of the device is the fast Ethernet and wireless (Banana Pro) adapters it provides—especially combined with the fast SATA interface—which is the base of powerful network applications.
Chapter 5, Using the GPIO Pins, introduces the GPIO pins. We will light up an LED using the shell. Furthermore, we will build a simple circuit, including a pull-up resistor and control an LED with a button. To achieve this, we will introduce the C programming language with the WiringPi library and the Python scripting language with the RPi.GPIO library.
Chapter 6, Multimedia, covers configuring the two audio outputs (line out and HDMI). We will discuss and solve the hardware acceleration problem by compiling important components and using these mentioned components to build video players and Kodi. The configuration of a remote control using LIRC is also covered.
The following is a list of things that you'll need to follow along with the recipes of this book:
A Banana Pi and/or a Banana Pro
An SD card
An SD card reader
A 5V USB power supply
A network connection (Ethernet and/or WiFi on Banana Pro)
An HDMI or a composite connection for display
A USB keyboard and a mouse
A Windows or Linux operating system
An external HDD/SSD plus a power supply and a SATA connection for Chapter 3, External Disks
A breadboard and various electrical components for Chapter 5, Using the GPIO Pins
This book is intended for anybody who wants to learn how they can utilize the capabilities of the Banana Pi to its full potential. It's full of step-by-step guides and detailed descriptions for the whole range of possibilities in a language that is appropriate for computer enthusiasts and experts alike. It would be helpful to have a basic knowledge of Unix-like operating systems or programming, but no prior experience is required as every concept is explained in the appropriate sections.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The commands used in the next steps assume that your SD card is recognized as /dev/mmcblk0."
A block of code is set as follows:
allow-hotplug wlan0 iface wlan0 inet manual wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ sudo cp interfaces interfaces.backup
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Choose the write mode Startup and click on Format to Normal."
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