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SARPi Project - Slacking on a Raspberry Pi
Setting up the NIC for (remote) Slackware Linux installation [optional]
You will require access to the network or the Internet (for example: if you wish to perform a remote installation from another computer, or you don't have a USB stick and wish to use a FTP/HTTP server as your source media) so you may want to setup the network interface card (NIC) at this point. If not, you can safely skip this section of the installer guide and continue to the Information on available drives section.
If you're performing a headless installation (i.e. remotely) then go to the Remote Slackware setup, configuration & install section on this page.
Before you can start configuring the NIC, you're going to need 2 pieces of information. • The IP address of your internet gateway • The IP address you want to assign to your Raspberry Pi
The default gateway is a device on a network (i.e. your router), through which another device on the network (i.e. your Raspberry Pi) can access or send data packets to another device on a different network (i.e. a web server on the Internet). This may seem mind-boggling but it's relatively easy to setup, as long as you have the correct default gateway IP address. Linux users can type 'route -n' at the command prompt on any system already connected to the Internet to find out their default gateway IP address. Windows users can run the command 'ipconfig' within Windows Command Processor (cmd.exe) to find out their default gateway IP address.
Assuming you have the correct network information required to setup your NIC, you are now going to type the following command:
ifconfig is a command line tool used to configure a network interface in Linux. eth0 (that's a ZERO on the end and not an "O" as in Orange) is the identity of the Ethernet interface on the Raspberry Pi. <RPi IP address> is the IP address you want to assign to your Raspberry Pi. netmask 255.255.255.0 denotes the network mask which decides the potential size of your network. up is the flag which enables the Ethernet card and makes it ready to send and receive data.
Next you need to specify the default gateway IP address and you're going to set this up by typing the following command:
Next you need to add a Domain Name Server (DNS) which is for managing the names of Web sites. DNS technology allows you to use names (like sarpi.penthux.net or slackware.com) and your browser is automagically directed to that website/page/file on the Internet. Without DNS you would only be able to access websites and files via their IP addresses.
With that in mind, you're going to create a file called resolv.conf and edit it by adding a line or two. This will be done easily using 'echo' and specifying a nameserver and OpenDNS IP addresses. Type the following on the command line:
root@slackware:~# echo nameserver 208.67.220.220 >> /etc/resolv.conf
Only one nameserver is required, but in this case two is always better than one.
Now you should be able to access the Internet and you can test this by typing:
You should see 5 ping results from using this command and hopefully something similar to the following screenshot:
If you receive a timeout error then something went wrong and you should check your settings (IP addresses). If those are correct then go back to the ifconfig section on this page and go through this process again.
If it's all good and you have a ping replies from google.com then your NIC and Internet connection has been setup successfully.
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Remote Slackware setup, configuration & install [optional]
Now that you have successfully setup your NIC it is possible to carry on with the setup, configuration and installation of Slackware Linux remotely, using PuTTY for example, or any other SSH client.
In order to start a SSH server on your Raspberry Pi which allows you to login remotely all you have to do is start 'dropbear' (a small SSH server and client). A 'dropbear' executable script is already included in the Slackware initial RAM disk files. To start 'dropbear' type the following at the command prompt:
You should now be able to log in via SSH on your Raspberry Pi. Use 'root' as the log-in username and just hit enter when asked for a password. If you're not already familiar with remotely logging in via SSH then it's probably not something you want to get into at this point.
Continue to the next section of this installer guide... Information on available drives
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