Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Book Image

Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents - Third Edition

Overview of this book

This book is for all mischievous Raspberry Pi owners who’d like to see their computer transform into a neat spy gadget to be used in a series of practical pranks and projects. No previous skills are required to follow along, and if you’re completely new to Linux, you’ll pick up much of the basics for free. We’ll help you set up your Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 and guide you through a number of pranks and secret agent techniques that are so inconspicuous yet high on mischief. You’ll learn how to configure your operating system for maximum mischief and start exploring audio, video, or Wi-Fi techniques. We’ll show you how to record, listen, or talk to people from a distance and how to set up your own phone network. Then, you’ll plug in your webcam and set up a motion detector with an alarm and find out what the other computers on your Wi-Fi network are up to. Once you’ve mastered the techniques, we’ll combine them with a battery pack and GPS for the ultimate off-road spy kit.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

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, and something that you should get into the habit of doing is updating the operating system regularly, and even though you may have the latest image installed, it's very likely that there are updated packages that can be installed. To update your OS, enter the following command:

$ sudo apt-get update

(This fetches information about which packages have been updated.)

Then enter the following command:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

(This proceeds to install the updated packages. Select Yes when prompted for installation. It will also upgrade the Pi to the latest firmware from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's GitHub repository—an online source code management service.)

This all may take a while depending on the number of updates required.