Raspberry Pi 3

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 3 because I thought it would be a fun thing to play with and maybe I could get migrated off the power hungry servers I’m running currently.

Some things are fun about it and others are a real pain. For example, building a base system is super simple but, docker is not.

Initial setup

To add mailx:

$ sudo apt install bsd-mailx

To set your timezone:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Troubleshooting Raspberry Pi 3

Swap space

By default there is only 100M of swap space. This is okay for small command line programs but, you will quickly overwhelm your system if you decide to do anything larger like run XWindows.

To expand the swap file, by default /var/swap, do the following:

  1. Disable swap
    # swapoff /var/swap
    
  2. Expand the current file
    # dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap bs=1M count=5000
    
    Note: This will create a 5G file. Adjust the count to whatever amount you need.
  3. Convert the file to a swap file
    # mkswap /var/swap
    
  4. Enable the new file
    # swapon /var/swap