This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.
One of the things I see allot is how hard it can be to setup a new Raspberry Pi. So when I saw this post from HackADay's Gerrit Coetzee, I couldn't pass it up...
Bake a Fresh Raspberry Pi: Never Struggle To Configure A Pi Again
"[David Ferguson] has put together a nice little tool called Pi Bakery. Half MIT Scratch, half configuration utility, it puts a nice visual face on all the various start-up scripts, and kludges that the Raspberry Pi community uses to configure the popular single board computer.
Raspberry Pi’s are a little weird. They mostly get crammed into the slots microcontrollers used to live in. The nice part about microcontrollers is that they just turn on and start going. There’s no OS to boot. No file system to mount. Of course the downside to microcontrollers is often that there’s no OS to boot and file system to mount. Regardless, mostly you’ve got to spend a bit configuring a Raspbian install before a Raspberry Pi really starts to encroach on the microcontroller’s territory.
Pi Bakery abstracts all this. You can drag blocks, representing scripts, in the order you’d like them run. If you want to your Pi to boot up, connect to WiFi, and then start a VNC server it’s as easy a dragging the blocks in the right order and filling in the blanks. You can see an example of it in operation in the video after the break.
..." [Entire post]
PiBakery
"The easiest way to setup a Raspberry Pi
Allows easy customisation of a standard Raspbian image.
Configure your Raspberry Pi to connect to your WiFi network as soon as it switches on for the very first time.
Automatically install a VNC server on your Pi the first time it boots up - so you can connect straight to it and start hacking.
Contribute your own blocks which can perform scripts and tasks, automating your Raspbery Pi's setup.
Compatibility with both Windows and Mac - with Linux support coming soon - means that the same tool can be used by everyone.
Install programs, such as Apache and PHP on your Raspberry Pi the first time it boots up.
Once you've written your perfect Raspbian to an SD card, you can easily change it by reconnecting it to your computer. PiBakery will automatically detect this, and enable you to add, edit and remove scripts that you've previously added.
Every time a new version of Raspbian is released, you'll have the option to download it so you can stay up to date.
All the blocks and setup tasks are stored centrally on GitHub, meaning that every time someone contributes a new block, everyone can benefit immediately from that change.
There's a Mac and Windows download and the source is available too! https://github.com/davidferguson/pibakery/
How cool is that?
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