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.

Hah.

Sounds like a permissions thing.

Do a 'getfacl' on both /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/ and /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/autologin.conf. i.e.:
 

getfacl /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/

and

getfacl /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/autologin.conf

Check the owner and permissions. The directory you created and the file you made (if it exists) should both be owned by and writeable by root (i.e. 'w' should be present in the user permissions). Check that.

Edit: To be explicit, you should see exactly this (except my filename is different - doesn't matter, it's the same file:
 

d@k ~ :) getfacl /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/override.conf
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/override.conf
# owner: root
# group: root
user::rw-
group::r--
other::r--

 

It didn't recognise 'getfacl' as a command, but on a whim I updated everything, rebooted yet again and it did let me write and save the file.  Unfortunately, it hasn't bypassed the login.  It's odd: there's no text when I open it in nano, but it's 4000-odd bytes in size, so there's something in it.  it there a command for just reading a file?

I'll have a root about, see if there's anything particular to Raspbian.

That's all very strange.

You can get the same info as with getfact with 'ls -l' (in the directory above what you want).

You can use 'cat' to just output what's in a file to the terminal.

cat /etc/blah/blah/whatever.conf

Did the /etc/systemd/ directory already exist? (I'm wondering whether Raspbian uses Systemd, google's not helping. You could run 'systemctl --version' to check, if it tells you stuff then it's there, if it errors then it's not).

In short, if Raspbian *is* using Systemd (and thus we're trying to autologin in the correct way) then I expect permissions are the problem since it sounds like it should work.

 

I'll have a root about.

Badumtsh

I'm simple and easy.

It's a bitterly ironic observation of the isolation to which so-called social technologies contribute, in artbollocks, anyway.

LOL no, you've misread it.  It says 'Self-management of Neck Pecker'.  I grew a penis on the side of my neck over the Christmas period and I'm struggling to come to terms with it.

I have spent three successive nights trying - unsuccessfully - to disable the screen time-out on Raspbian.  This should not be a three-night task, even for a thicko like me..

This is why Linux will always remain the province of a talented and passionate few.

There are two commends, one will work inside X, one will work on a virtual terminal. I'm not clear on which you're doing so it's difficult to help.
 
You're not exactly trying to do a typical thing here. You're booting from an SD card to a CLI on a super-stripped-down ARM-based £30 computer.

If you were running a normal consumer-level distro (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mint etc.)  with the default window manager you'd disable powersaving in exactly the same way you would in Windows - via the control panel (step 1, step 2).
 

Hey! :@

Sup G?