What a great day! At around midday I received my brand-spanking new Raspberry Pi 3 bundle along with a very nice Tecknet compact and wireless keyboard/mouse combo.

After an hour or so of carefully unpacking, admiring and photographing (to Twitter and Instagram) my beautiful new mini computer, I gently placed the board into the official black case and began connecting up the HDMI and power cables.

On powering up the only option I had was to install Raspbian, the Debian-based OS. Installation didn’t take long, within minutes of that (having written ‘Hello, world’ in the text editor) I had managed to get the Pi online and whitelisted by our wireless router.

The Pi currently has the IP address of 192.168.0.12, I was quite surprised by just how many devices we now have whitelisted on the router (not even counting the several wired devices), we’re becoming a very connected household.

I tested the network by using ‘sudo ping 192.168.0.1 -c 8’ to ping the wireless router, it worked, but I did at first notice quite some latency and packet loss which I’m putting down to possible channel interference in the area, in fact the Internet has been pretty terrible lately, especially when watching YouTube videos on my Asus/Google Android tablet during the evenings.

Tightvncserver

After some investigation, I found the Tightvnc server to be running on port 5901. The remote desktop works well, but is noticeably laggy at times, the icons appear ‘JPEGy’, clearly compressed, slightly washed-out and artefacty, I may well be able to fix this in the settings, though.

Apache web server

Setting up Apache was a breeze, didn’t even need a restart!

$ sudo apt-get install apache2

I had to run the command sudo chown pi: index.html in /var/www/html to allow the ‘pi’ user account write access to the index.html file used by Apache as the default document.

User Directories

On Linux-like systems, Apache allows users to use their public_html directories as accessible directories on the web server using the example.com/~[username] URL. I think I had to create the public_html directory thinking that would work, but I had to do a little more to get userdirs working.

Apache on Debian/Raspbian is arranged a little differently in respect to the configuration files than what I’m used to. In order to enable user directories I had to navigate to the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled directory and created symbolic links to the files userdir.conf and userdir.load in the mods-available directory. After restarting the Apache service I was then able to navigate to the /~pi user directory.

  $ cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
  
  $ sudo ln -s ../mods-available/userdir.conf
  
  $ sudo ln -s ../mods-available/userdir.load

  $ sudo apachectl restart