Once you’ve copied one of the Debian disk images to an SD card, you may have noticed that the disk image is only for 2GB and you have a lot of unused space on your SD card. The raspi-config util has an option (Expand Root FS) to resize your root partition for you. There’s also plenty of other utils to do the job. I used gparted from a gparted LiveCD booted on my Mac to resize my partition and it worked well.
Configuring a static IP on Debian Wheezy for Raspberry Pi
$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
Change:
iface eth0 inet dhcp
to
iface eth0 inet static
Below this line enter the following, replacing x where necessary for your network config.
address 192.168.x.x
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.x.0
broadcast 192.168.x.255
gateway 192.168.x.x
Things you always forget: XML Character Entities
Certain characters break XML or need to be escaped in HTML so they are rendered literally and not interpreted themselves as markup. There’s a few predefined character entities that are commonly used:
- < : <
- > : >
- & : &
For other characters though, you sometimes need to use their Unicode encoded value. For example to literally display { and } in a JSP or JSF page (since they are used in EL syntax ${} and #{} ), you can use their unicode values like this:
- { : {
- } : }
There’s many unicode ref charts online, here’s one that I’ve used:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/Character_reference/0000-0FFF
Removing a passphrase from an OpenSSH pub key
I’d set a passphrase on an OpenSSH key that I use to connect to a git repo on my local server. It started to get annoying, and more annoying with any other tool that I tried to use with the same key as it’s seems not all tools are setup to handle the prompting for the keyphrase.
Quickest workaround: remove the passphrase with ‘ssh-keygen -p’
– when prompted give the name of the pub/priv keypair (eg id_rsa), give the current keyphrase, and then when prompted for the new keyphrase, just hit return and again to confirm.