Thanks Xen.  got to file a tax return now, but I'll be back & try all this out when I'm done.

Hijack: What's the best flavour of linux for Pi these days, the official raspbian or soething else?

I've got a Pi 2 coming today which is going to be used with a touch screen to run the software for my laser cutter (there's one that needs a window manager & one that runs as a node.js thing so need the server components to run, and this then accessed through a browser).

Give drew's suggestion a go first.

I typed all this out then pressed the back button on my mouse :@

sudo raspi-config 

Set it to not go to desktop on boot
http://elinux.org/RPi_raspi-config#boot_behaviour_-_Start_desktop_on_boot.3F

I can't remember if Raspbian does an auto-login, if it doesn't use one of drew's suggestions for that.

sudo nano /usr/local/bin/lonely

Paste in
 

#!/bin/sh
#

while true; do
node /home/pi/twitter_stream/index.js
sleep 5
done

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/lonely
to makes it executable

sudo crontab -e
add the line
@reboot /usr/local/bin/lonely
save and exit

reboot

This may work, or may need tweaking slightly.
 

How should we interpret that video? Linux is a pain in the neck?

I like Arch. So I like Arch on the RPi too. The benefit of Arch is that it's really simple where simple means no layers of abstraction added on top of things, no configuration tools, everything is as vanilla as possible. Which makes configuring it a breeze once you know what you're doing. The Wiki is great.

If that doesn't appeal then yeah, go with Raspian. It's based on Debian so it's super-solid and very widely used, has tonnes of packages and there's plenty of info out there.

 

Stop saying Arch is simple. It's not simple, and that's why nobody else likes it.

Bastard.

simple != easy

Some of the laser software can be quite processor intensive (converting an image to a fake raster file, for example), so I think keeping things minimal would be good.

But then I'd also quite like to install XBMC for when I'm not laser cutting :$

Seems to be a fair bit about setting up Kodi/XBMC in the arch wiki. Wonder if it works the same on the ARM version for Raspberry Pi...

Consider dual booting? Maybe from a USB stick running XBMC on Raspbian or OpenElec for super streamline.

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.