Tag Archives: Computer Science

PiServer Client Image Adjustments

After running PiServer for a few years now, we have the process of adjusting our client images fairly well documented. I thought I would share that process here for others making the move from PiNet to PiServer.

Some of the packages we install / uninstall may not be relevant to you; please adjust accordingly!

After installing PiServer certain software needs installing and uninstalling from the standard Raspbian Full image (1). First make a clone (2) of the Raspbian Full image in PiServer and then open a shell (4) for the new software image.

Adjust existing software / configs

Perform these following steps inside the shell (4) for the operating system you have just cloned.

APT Sources

We run an APT Cache server in our school, here we update the APT sources to use the cache server.

sed -i 's+http://+http://<APT Cache Server FQDN>:3142/+g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sed -i 's+http://+http://<APT Cache Server FQDN>:3142/+g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list

Now update and upgrade through APT:

apt update && apt dist-upgrade -y

Enable BASH Tab Completion

Open the bash.bashrc file for editing in nano:

nano /etc/bash.bashrc

Uncomment the “# enable bash completion in interactive shells” section:

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
if ! shopt -oq posix; then
    if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
        . /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
    elif [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
        . /etc/bash_completion
    fi
fi

“Ctrl + o” followed by “Enter” to write the file, “Ctrl + x” to exit. Now close and reopen your CHROOT shell.

Turn off screen blanking

raspi-config
  • Select “Display Options”
  • Select “D4 Screen Blanking”
  • Select “<No>”
  • Select “<OK>”
  • Select “<Finish>”
  • Select “<Yes>”

Chromium Managed Policy

We now apply a custom json policy file to the Chromium install on the clients. There is absolutely loads that you can set here; you should probably go and read over here to work what you need to set in your environment!

nano /etc/chromium-browser/policies/managed/sch-policy.json

Add the following to the file and save:

{
    "HomepageLocation": "https://<Home Page URL>",
    "BrowserGuestModeEnabled": false,
    "IncognitoModeAvailability": 1,
    "RestoreOnStartup": 1,
    "PopupsAllowedForUrls": [
        "http://<Smoothwall FQDN>", 
        "https://<Smoothwall FQDN>"
    ]
}

Install Smoothwall SSL certs

We run Smoothwall for our filtering and have it set to use IDex agents running on our Domain Controllers for authentication. The great thing with this is that as users are logging into the Raspberry Pi devices using their AD credentials, the IDex agent on the DCs sees the log on as a standard log in and filters all access for the Raspberry Pi devices as if they were Windows devices on the network… I might do another write-up with more detail about this later!

As well as setting up IDex for filtering, we also install the Smoothwall’s root CA certificate on the Raspberry Pi devices.

  • Download the root CA certificate from Smoothwall here: https://<smoothwall FQDN>:441/ui/admin/trust
  • Rename the file to: smoothwall-<YYYY>.crt
  • SCP this to the PiServer pi user’s home directory
  • Copy it to this directory in each OS image from a SSH connection directly to the PiServer:
sudo cp /home/pi/smoothwall-<YYYY>.crt /var/lib/piserver/os/<CLIENT OS NAME>/usr/local/share/ca-certificates/

Pi Dual Monitor fix

Using dual monitors on the Raspberry Pi with an image from PiServer does not quite work… I have my teacher’s Raspberry Pi connected to a monitor and the projector!

Back in the CHROOT shell for your new OS:

mv /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbturbo.conf.fubar

Disable Overscan

echo "disable_overscan=1" >> /boot/config.txt

Enable the camera module

raspi-config
  • Select option 3 “Interface Options”
  • Select option P1 “Camera”
  • Select “Yes”, then “OK” then “Finish”
  • Select “No” when asked to reboot

Install new software

Aptitude installs

apt update && apt install gimp sl imagemagick gpac gnome-screenshot python3-matplotlib blender inkscape libnss3-tools mariadb-client dia dia-shapes gsfonts-x11 -y

Python 3 PIP Installs

pip3 install bluedot Pillow guizero network

FanShim library and service

All our Pi 4 devices use the Pimoroni Fan SHIM for cooling; so here we install and configure the software.

git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/fanshim-python
cd fanshim-python
./install.sh
cd examples
./install-service.sh --on-threshold 65 --off-threshold 55 --delay 2

User login scripts

In this section we create logon scripts that run each time a user logs into the Raspberry Pi devices.

Smoothwall Cert install

Create the user login script to import the Smoothwall cert:

nano /etc/profile.d/import-Smoothwall-SSL.sh

Enter the following into this file:

certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -n "Smoothwall <YYYY>" -t "TCu,Cu,Tu" -i /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/smothwall-<YYYY>.crt

Apache User Dir setup

Create the user login script to create the public_html directory and fix permissions for Apache to read it:

nano /etc/profile.d/apache-user-dir.sh

Enter the following into this file:

mkdir $HOME/public_html
chmod 711 $HOME
chmod 711 $HOME/public_html

Uninstall software

apt update && apt remove bluej greenfoot-unbundled wolfram-engine wolframscript nodered claws-mail realvnc-vnc-viewer realvnc-vnc-server -y && apt autoremove -y

Overclock the Pi 4

These settings in the config.txt file overclock the PI 4. The [pi4] and [all] ensure that older Pis do not get these settings applied.

echo -e "\n\n# Pi 4 Overclock\n[pi4]\nover_voltage=6\narm_freq=2100\ngpu_freq=750\n[all]" >> /boot/config.txt

Teacher’s RPi Image

If you are setting up a teacher’s Raspberry Pi Image then follow these additional steps:

Install Remmina

Adjust the URL that is being echoed to match your APT Cache server…

apt update && apt install dirmngr fswebcam -y
apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://www.remmina.org/raspbian/remmina_raspbian.asc
echo "deb http://<APT Cache Server FQDN>:3142/www.remmina.org/raspbian/ buster main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/remmina_raspbian.list
apt update && apt install remmina -y

Pi 4, Buster and PiServer – Part II

This post is an update to my earlier post “Pi 4, Buster and PiServer” where I talked about the tweaks and adjustments I had to make to get Pi 4s working with the PiServer application. Since that post, the Buster version of the “Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac” has been released and all of the tweaks I had to make have been added to the standard version of PiServer.

This post is based heavily on our internal documentation for setting up PiServer so some parts may not apply in your setting!

I will be writing a follow-up post soon about the process we use to customise our Raspberry Pi client operating systems using PiServer.

Continue reading Pi 4, Buster and PiServer – Part II

Pi 4, Buster and PiServer

Note: There is an updated version of this post here: https://www.jonwitts.co.uk/archives/1422

I was very excited with the release of the Raspberry Pi 4, not just because I am a great fan of the Raspberry Pi and wanted to get my hands on the latest and greatest; but also because I have been teaching my Computer Science classes pretty much exclusively using the Raspberry Pi computer for the past few years.

I say “pretty much” because there had always been a few sticking points when we had to leave my RPi CS classroom and up sticks to the Windows PC lab. In the most part it was when we needed to do any graphics editing (in Photoshop) or anything that relied on using Google Drive and Docs heavily.

It was with great excitement that I saw the new Pi 4 with 4 Gb of RAM and full gigabit networking… However as network boot was not available out-of-the-box and the PiServer software was not yet updated to be used with Pi 4s and Raspbian Buster; there was a bit of work to do…

With great thanks to the devs over at the PiServer github page, I now have a working PiServer setup for use with Pi 4 devices! Set up instructions below 😀

Continue reading Pi 4, Buster and PiServer

Installing Python Libraries on a School Network

This question keeps coming up on various forums and on Twitter so I thought I would share how we install Python and the extra libraries we use across our school network. A recent discussion on Twitter between Chris Sharples and Laura caught my attention.

Chris was asking Laura for an MSI package version of her fantastic GUI Zero Python library.


So I offered to write up a blog post about how we install extra Python packages across our school network.


Now all school networks differ and, as they say, YMMV! But for what it’s worth here’s how we do it…

Continue reading Installing Python Libraries on a School Network

Computational Thinking for Educators

I was asked for our school’s latest INSET day to devise a half-hour session which I would repeat during the day for all teaching staff on the fairly loose topic of sharing good practice / sharing our classroom activities.

Now I was fairly sure that 30 minutes was not going to be long enough for me to introduce much interesting in the way of Computer Science or code for a group of teachers who had never experienced it before, so I began to think about what I could deliver.

My thoughts turned to some of the Computational Thinking lessons we do with our students as they are accessible and don’t require the use of a computer. The fact that I was going to deliver a session on sharing good practice from my teaching and that it would not involve any tech other than a projector (although  it is a good one, you can visit BuyDLP.com to make sure) and presentation, would no doubt come as a shock to some of my colleagues!
Continue reading Computational Thinking for Educators

The Pi, The Parliament and The Palace

Over the past couple of months I have been lucky enough to be invited by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to attend two of their events in London.

The first of these events took place on September 8th, on the terrace of the Houses of Parliament, to celebrate the sale of 10 million Raspberry Pi computers. The event was attending by a wide cross-section of the Raspberry Pi community and afforded me the opportunity to meet with many people who I had, until then, only had had the pleasure of working with on-line. This opportunity also introduced me to a wide range of other partners and people involved in the development and engineering of Britain’s best-selling computer to date.

The second event I was invited to attend was held on the 5th October;  a reception at St James’s Palace hosted by the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s patron, the Duke of York. This event was a celebration of, and a “thank you” to, the many different people and organisations who support and make up the Raspberry Pi community. Again, this event gave me the opportunity to meet up again with many familiar faces and get to know a few new faces, too!

Continue reading The Pi, The Parliament and The Palace

Embed a Twitter Feed into Moodle

In a recent #NT2tEU Twitter chat someone posed the question about how you link Twitter and Moodle together. There were suggestions about using your Twitter account to post messages about upcoming events and assignments in Moodle, linking back to them with the URL.

The way I tend to use Twitter and Moodle together is the other way round. I let Moodle take care of sending out the emails it needs for notifications, and I use Twitter as a way of pulling interesting feeds of information back into my Moodle courses.

To do this we are going to set up a Twitter Widget and then embed this code into a HTML block on our Moodle course page

Continue reading Embed a Twitter Feed into Moodle

Christmas Sonic Pi

This week my Year 8 class asked if they could do something festive with me for their last lesson before we break up next week. Now I am not a believer in stopping work just because it is the last week of term, but I thought I could probably give them a Computer Science lesson and easily add a Christmas theme to get the best of both worlds. I gave them the choice of either using Python Turtle art to create festive pictures, or use Sonic Pi to “code” some Christmas music.

The class went for Sonic Pi; so I thought I would share my lesson plan here.

Continue reading Christmas Sonic Pi

Hello Minecraft World!

Minecraft screen shots with your Raspberry Pi

We are just about to begin teaching our Python and Minecraft unit at school so I began testing everything out on our latest Raspberry Pi image to make sure we were ready for the lessons and adjust any of the lesson plans if necessary.

Our latest Raspberry Pi image runs Jessie. Now one of the improvements Jessie brings us is that the Print Screen button on your keyboard has been set up to run Scrot in the background to save a png screen shot into your home directory. You can read more about it here.

Now that is great as for quite some time taking a screen shot on your Raspberry Pi involved installing Scrot and then running it from the terminal; not the most user-friendly way to get students to take screen shots!

Continue reading Minecraft screen shots with your Raspberry Pi

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

Continue reading Updating our Raspberry Pi Image