Monday, May 2, 2016

WPA/WPA2 configuration in Arch Linux on Raspberry Pi

With current Arch Linux on Raspberry Pi 1/2/3, configuring WiFi for WPA/WPA2 is as quick as:
  1. Issue "wifi-menu" as root(a few seconds of scanning will take place)
  2. A menu of broadcasted SSIDs will be displayed where you select your wireless network(See below for non-broadcasted SSIDs)
  3. Enter the credentials which will create a profile in "/etc/netctl"(0600 mode owned by root)
  4.  With 'netctl' now in-use on Arch Linux, you can say "netctl enable <SSID>" as superuser to start WiFi on boot.(adds a link to 'systemd' profiles that multi-user wants)
This will use 'dhcpd' to obtain an address. If you have a hidden/non-broadcast SSID, you'll need to create an entry in "wpa_supplicant.conf" with "scan_ssid" set to 1 among setting other options.(plenty of examples and option details exist in that file) For more info on dynamic or static config, visit Arch Linux's wireless network config page.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

A few cool things I've learned about Python:
  • "pylint somefile.py" - Great way to score your code against PEP8 style guide(pylint.org)
  • "pydoc -w yourmodule" - Generates HTML formatting for your module from your docstrings
  • Pillow is the current fork of module PIL(Python Imaging Library) which is good for image manipulation and can be used in combination with tkinter(Python 3) to rapidly prototype displays/GUIs