Playing with the Raspberry Pi

I’ve been tinkering with the Pi for a couple of months now, after resisting the call of RISC for years. These little machines have finally caught up to about Pentium II performance, which is to say they’re moderately good as a desktop PC, and excellent as a tiny Linux server.

The Kali people maintain an ARM image, though, which inevitably meant my students came to me about setting up Kali on the Pi. Depending on the student, I’m okay with that, but in most cases the request is cue for a sit-down talk about trust, as in, do you know these Kali people and if they had bad intentions should you be running this OS in your home? Nothing against Kali: I’m just nervous about any system with lots of moving parts, most of them mostly invisible.

That’s why I’ve been working with customized images of Fedora 21 and 22 with the Security Spin added on. I like this distro and the community that supports it (I know them personally), and the whole product suite is very thoroughly reviewed. Which is to say, I’ve made a trust decision.

And Fedora maintains an ARM image (yipee!), so off I went and ordered a Pi.

So: I don’t understand the unboxing video thing. I guess it’s a good way to verify you got all the parts? But since I’m going to use the devil out of this thing in my classes, might as well document from start to finish. So here’s the beginning:

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