More Raspberry Flavoured KoolAid... Upgrading

Completing some more Adafruit lessons meant :

sudo apt-get update

git clone https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Raspberry-Pi-Python-Code.git
sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install python-rpi.gpio

sudo apt-get install python-smbus
sudo apt-get install i2c-tools

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install feedparser
sudo easy_install -U distribute
sudo pip install RPi.GPIO

Some of that appeared to be doing nothing, gracefully not installing the stuff that was already there.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

goes looking for upgrades to the distribution. Make sure the sudo commands are directed against the Raspberry Pi and not against your base system like my iMac. Yet another good reason not to use the same passwords for different machines. It took a fair amount of time to go and get a ton of stuff. Then it failed on connecting to an archive (possibly because I was poking at it, or maybe something to do with the VNC session?), so I ran it again and it appeared to start up where it left off, ignoring the stuff it had already completed. That fair bit of time begins to look like it might be measured in hours... about two of them eventually ;-) Reboot with sudo shutdown now -r and the connection is lost, but returns with a new ssh.

Setting up Samba for File Sharing

Jeremy Morgan seems to have a bunch of useful materials for such things. /etc/samba/smb.conf exists and I see rwspi showing in the finder, so I assume there's just some config to do, but smbpasswd is not found, so I start at the beginning.

The rwspi near the bottom has been
there all along, but no joy connecting

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install samba
sudo apt-get install samba-common-bin
sudo smbpasswd -a pi
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
   security = user         these were uncommented/changed
   socket options = TCP_NODELAY
   [homes]
   readonly = no
   valid users = pi

   [RWSRoot]                           this was added
   path = /
   comment = Root Access
   valid users = pi
   writeable = yes
   browseable = yes


Then I followed the instructions to restart the samba demons, but the link in the finder still did nothing useful. Reboot all round. Still no joy. Tried opening the pi share on a windows machine and it worked, so this must be a mac issue. Enabling SMB sharing for the user didn't fix it. The mac seems to think rwspi is another mac.

Solution: Finder/Go/Connect to Server... smb://rwspi.local/ and hit + to add it to the favourites list. Log in as pi with the appropriate password. Now there's an rwspi.local entry at the top of the shared list and I can see both the root and the pi home directories.