Pi3 Adds a Twist

I guess I was overly optimistic that the Raspbian system image I had crafted for the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B would just work when I plugged in the MicroSD card and powered it up. Nope, just a pretty colorful screen was all I got. So then I started to read. I know, right? I did a quick GTS and read a post about trying to update “Wheezy” for use on the Pi3, but it seems that the repository for Wheezy is not being updated with all the latest modules for the ARM v8 processor in the Pi3 Model B. Oh well.

In a recent post I talked about all the apps I had installed on the Wheezy builds over the past 2 years. So, today I embark on the journey of creating a new build based on the Raspbian Jessie O/S for the ARM v8 processor. I’m doing this because I want to use the built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth features. I don’t really know yet if there is more value than that, but as I go I will post articles on the progress.

I already discovered that my console auto-login and my interface configurations are handled differently in Jessie. I don’t particularly want to change the architecture of my build so I used <sudo apt-get –purge remove dhcpcd5> and removed dhcpcd5 so I could simply use the /etc/network/interfaces file for my needs.

For the console autologin I used the following technique to make that work:

$ sudo -i
# mkdir -pv /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d
# nano /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/autologin.conf

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --autologin pi --noclear %I 38400 linux

reboot

You may not actually need the mkdir command if the directory is already present – as was my case. I don’t know why you must have the “empty” ExecStart= line, but without that line my Pi3 did not finish with a usable console prompt, and I had to SSH into the Pi3 to change the autologin.conf file and add that line and reboot.

So more to follow later…
jc