Raspberry Pi Tips/Tricks/Useful Links and Projects

I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi B+ and a Raspberry Pi 2. I am looking into interesting Pi projects, thus thought to document them and share in this post. I haven't tested these, but once I test, I will update them.

Useful projects links:

1. https://github.com/careyer/awesome-raspberry-pi

Operating systems:

1. RetroPie (https://retropie.org.uk/) allows you to turn your Raspberry Pi or PC into a retro-gaming machine.
2. Raspbian 
3. Screenly 
4. MotionEyeOS 
5. RasPlex
6. DietPi

Media Center:

1. Xbian (http://www.xbian.org/what-is-xbian/) is a small, fast and lightweight media center distribution.
2. OSMC
3. LibreMC
4. Installing OpenElec on Raspberry Pi, OpenElec Builds

Interesting projects:

• Magic Mirror, Mirrors designed around the world, GitHub repository.
• Photo Frame.
• NAS
• Raspberry Pi NAS
• Raspberry Pi NAS with redundancy using rsync
• How to make a Raspberry Pi NAS Youtube video
• Raspberry Pi camera live streaming and recording web interface
• Configuring Plex in OSMC (fixing the issue with some configuration - forum topic)
• BlissFlixx

Some of the useful pieces of information:

The default pi user on Raspbian is a sudoer. This gives the ability to run commands as root when preceded by sudo, and to switch to the root user with[pre class="brush:bash"]sudo su[/pre]
Launch Raspbian Config :[pre class="brush:bash"]
sudo raspi-config[/pre]

Compiling ffmpeg in Raspbian (with openssl):

[pre class="brush:bash"]
sudo apt-get install openssh
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure --prefix=/home/pi/arm --enable-openssl
make
make install

# add the following to .bashrc file
export PATH=$PATH”:$HOME/arm/bin”[/pre]


Configuring OpenVPN:

[pre class="brush:bash"]
sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc
sudo apt-get install openvpn network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
sudo openvpn --config ****.ovpn[/pre]

The above will ask the username and password each time when you login. You can avoid this by storing your username and password in a text file. Following instructions below,
[pre class="brush:bash"]
vim authorisation.txt

#enter the username and password as shown below
username
password

#now find the line with "auth-user-pass" within the *.ovpn file and replace is with the following
auth-user-pass authorisation.txt[/pre]