Another Life

As someone with a bent for security, there are several 'rules' that I follow.  First is to avoid connecting an unsecured device to the Internet.  Another is to always change the factory default passwords to achieve the first rule.  The third is to never write a password down.  This often requires that I break rules one and two when I forget a password.

I did get my previous RPi install up and running under wheezy, with a wired USB keyboard and mouse.  No problems.  Even set the root password.  Forgot that too.

Opportunity.

So now that we have yet another edition of the Wheezy image to play with, I'll start again, with the following resources:

1 - Rpi Version 1 board inside a perspex case
1 - micro USB, 1A power supply
1 - HDMI -> DVI dongle
1 - 17" LCD monitor
1 - SanDisk 8GB 10 SD Card
1 - USB keyboard
1 - USB Mouse

For the software side, I have the latest "Wheezy" image
2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img

Research and Lessons
So, what I have found out since the last attempt to fire up the RPi is:

overscan - this setting allow you to correct for boarders around the screen image on HD displays and for the correct centering of the screen.

memory_split - this config setting allows you to control how much of the RAM is dedicated to the GPU processing.  There are three possible settings: 32MiB, 64MiB and 128MiB.  64 meg is the default setting.  If you want faster graphics pump it up to 128 meg.

overclock - obvious what this config setting is for.  The options available are complex, and I am not going to pretend to know them all.  See RPi Config wiki for further details.

Outcomes
So far much the same as the previous occasion.  I tried running change_pass in the config - erred for some unexplained reason.  Selected en_AU ISO-8859-1 as my locale.  Went to the memory_split option - here the config gives 5 options, 16/32/64/128/256.  64 is the default, but I think I want 128, as I will test this build as a graphical user workstation for the home.  Overclock I will leave alone for now.  SSH, I will leave alone.  For now I will also leave the boot behaviour alone, as I want to be able to do admin from the command line at times.

After the reboot and login, have changed the password.  Now I'm running startx. What a clean interface - I like it.