Updating our Raspberry Pi Image

We have just purchased a set of Raspberry Pi 2 boards to upgrade our Raspberry Pi B+ / HDMIPI set-up which we have been using for Computer Science this year. I will not go into the reasons why or the specifications of the Raspberry Pi 2; but needless to say the performance increase seen will make teaching with these devices much easier!

So we received our new Pi 2 boards and got straight into removing the old B+ boards from our HDMIPI set-up and installing the new Pi 2 boards. Pretty soon I ran into an issue though; having replaced the Pi board and using one of our SD Cards with our current image installed on it, the system would not boot; it just sat there at the rainbow boot screen. It turns out that the Pi 2 has an updated ARM processor and therefore needs the latest updates installing for the Pi to boot.  Now I could have just downloaded the latest Rasbian image and been up and running, but we have quite a few customisations to our image which I wanted to keep

So I began reading up on how to apply the latest updates to our current image so that it would work with both the Pi B+ boards and the Pi 2 boards. Here are the steps I performed to get our image updated and running all the latest UI improvements:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-net-mods

Select “Y” when prompted about installing the updated network interfaces file

sudo reboot

When your device reboots we then needed to edited the new dhcpcd config file as networking is now handled in a slightly different way. dhcpcd does not send the devices MAC address in its DHCP request, it now sends a DUID instead. The next steps will switch your device back to sending a plain MAC address in its DHCP request. We needed to do this as our IP addresses are allocated with DHCP reservations!

sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf

Add # (comment symbol) in front of line 14 – “duid”
Delete # in front of line 11 – “clientid”
Press “Ctrl + O” to write Out file – Press enter to confirm file name
Press “Ctrl + X” to eXit file

sudo reboot

I then saw my device be assigned the correct DHCP address from our DHCP server! Now I could install the Ice Weasel browser so we have an up-to-date HTML5 browser available to us.

sudo apt-get install iceweasel

The next thing I did was to start x and tidying up the desktop a little. I deleted all the short-cuts from the desktop leaving just the “Waste Basket” visible. I then edited the “Application Launcher” panel and removed all applications from it apart from “File Manager”. I then added “Ice Weasel” as an application to the launcher.

The final step was to set up Ice Weasel how I wanted it, so I ran the programme and opened the preferences; setting the home page, tracking preferences, network proxy detection type and set it as the default browser.

A little bit of checking of the image and it was then ready to be copied to an image and deployed to all our SD Cards ready for teaching in September!

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