Raspbian autologs in, but when you open a fullscreen terminal it irritatingly asks you to log in again.

aye it's a possibility, would like to keep it on one though if possible. If I can keep some (minimal coms) stuff running in the background and watch videos while the laser completes its job that'd be awesome. Amazon man just brought the pi so I'm going to hunt down an SD card and try it out.

Hmmm. What are you logging in *to*, exactly? I'd assumed from the description that you were just logging in on the virtual console. But 'opening a fullscreen terminal' doesn't make sense in that context (unless you just mean switching TTYs, in which case: don't :D).

Edit: I guess maybe Raspian has some default GUI which starts, which you're logging in to, and then switching to TTY1 with ctrl+alt+f1?

If so, if there's some GUI, find out how to prevent that from starting (since you're not using it).

If not, just use the TTY that it autologs in on. If you want to clear the screen you can just do:
 

clear

(You can add that to /etc/profile so that it happens once the login terminal is up)

I've only used Kodi on the RPi so I don't know firsthand what it's like elsewhere but I believe it's the same everywhere. It performs really well (especially given how poorly graphical desktops tend to perform on the Pi).

I use it on my other other Pi, but with the purpose built Xbian build - based on Raspbian, but stripped down to only have what Kodi needs and not a lot else.

It runs very, very well on a Pi 2, and I've also got some other bits and pieces running on it in the background (mainly torrent stuff - I attempted to setup a VPN with it so I could log in to the home network remotely, but it didn't work first time so I gave up and forgot about it  :'-D )

I suspect that is God's excuse for this universe ...

I setup a VPN the other day!

(For playing Titan Quest :$ )

Well that pretty much settles it - Arch don't provide an image anymore for writing to my SD card, which means I need a linux machine to install it.  Raspbian it is then :C

(A guy has put an image file on Sourceforge, but sourceforge is all kinds of fucked up right now)

Where you looking? Seems up-to-date to me: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/broadcom/raspberry-pi-2

Edit: nm, get you now.

Yup.

Also, I've now fucked my SD card partition table. Windows is too shite to fix it, so now I need to go hunting for a free tool that'll do the job. Bloody windows :@

lol @ Windows.

(Just use any old liveCD. For both things)

Why the fuck didn't I do that? I have a fucing bootable USB stick on my keychain with a linux on it. Such an asshole.

(giggle)

Gparted on whatever bootable linux you have. Always the best way to sort things (or trash them if you need to).

See, I knew that. Just didn't occur to me. Such a dumb fuck today. 

Finally writing the raspbian image to my SD card. 

Going to experiment with a couple of things tonight: writing software for the pi to display data coming over the SPI line on screen in whatever window manager raspian uses and then Interfacing the PI with an arduino LCD-keypad shield (and shoving some of the SPI data I'm reading over to the LCD). 

If I can make all that work then my laser cutter is going to be fucking /awesome/.

I've managed to get it to boot into a fullscreen terminal, but can't autologin.  I tried your first link and I was able to create the directory and autologin.conf file, but I then didn't have permission to modify it with the code
  None of the keyboard commands I knew (Ctrl+O, Ctrl+X) would let me write to the file.

Great, now fuck off out of my thread. xxx

You need to both create the directory/file and edit the file as root (so use sudo).

If you're using nano then to save the file you press ctrl+x then it'll ask for confirmation so press y then press enter to accept the location.

Or did something else go wrong?

Yeah, I did exactly as you described and managed to create the folder and was able to write the file content, but when I got to trying to save it, Ctrl-X (or Ctrl-O) it refused to modify the file.  

It said it was complete with errors, and the error was that it hadn't done it.  A fairly liberal interpretation of 'complete', I felt.