Cloudy Raspberry Pi

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The Raspberry Pi is a tiny and affordable computer as large as a credit card, made mainly to be used for educational purposes and in small projects.

This board has an ARM processor and several input-output interfaces; video, sound, Ethernet, USB, GPIO, etc. For that reason is needed an operative system prepared to run on an ARM architecture and with the corresponding drivers to make these interfaces work.

In our case, to install Cloudy, the Raspberry Pi will be prepared with an already adapted distribution based in Debian like it's Raspbian, and once it is done we will "cloudynize" it to add all the particular content of Cloudy.


Note: this guide, as well as the different Cloudy installation tests, has been done with the Raspbian O.S.; but it is possible that with the same steps it work with another Debian based distribution.


Download Raspbian

Go to the official website and download the ISO image with the operating system you will use as a base.

Alternatively a Raspbian variant can be used, the Raspbian Server Edition, which is already prepared without the unneeded packages (graphical system, sound, etc.) in the use of the Raspberry Pi as a server.


Install and configure Raspbian

Write the image in an SD card. Depending on the operating system of your PC you can follow one of these guides to write ISO images.

Now insert the card and power on the board to start the configuration process with the raspi-config tool.

Basically it's recommended to do:

  1. Expand the file system to use the whole SD storage space.
  2. Change the password of the pi user (the system default one).
  3. Change the localization if another language is wanted, the timezone and the keyboard layout.
  4. In the advanced options; enable the SSH server, change the hostname and update the raspi-config.

If you want to do some more changes, you can find more information in the raspi-config documentation.

We won't extend more to explain how to install and to configure Raspbian because is widely documented in the Web.

Additional options

As it's commented above, there is a variant of Raspbian customized to work as a server, deleting all the unneeded packages. This version should work like the original Raspbian, but it's recommended to adapt the system just after the installation manually or automating it with the script that uninstalls the packages to leave the system like the Rasbian Server Edition.

You can find more info and download that script at this website.


Install Cloudy

To install Cloudy you can follow the instructions to convert a plain Debian installation in Cloudy by adding the system the specific files and tools of the distribution.

We call it "cloudynize".

We recommend to use a script to automate the process. You can know how to in the wiki page that explains how to "cloudynize".

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