The Saturday Catch

Peter ScargillRaspberry Pi 24 Comments on The Saturday Catch

While working on my Raspberry Pi image (with everything I need stored in an image so it it all goes to hell I can recover everything) I realised something I was missing on the Pi was a package manager. A graphical APT-GET for those who are not too keen on command lines. Well I came across this link. http://www.neil-black.co.uk/install-a-graphical-package-manager-on-the-raspberry-pi#.VTLxwCHCoyA

Suffice it to say this is a not-too-exciting but graphical package manager – but the real catch for me as an unwilling-Linux-newbie was this…   I use Geany editor and half of the time I need root privileges because the default settings won’t let me save some files I’ve edited. I usually end up using SUDO GEANY at the terminal just to bring it up in the right mode.

Well, not any more. Half way down the link above are instructions for changing menu items such as Geany and in fact this package manager – to run as root (i.e. the highest level of privilege).

The only difference I made was this.. So for Geany…

Find /usr/share/applications/geany.desktop (I’m guessing this applies to anything else)

and near the end you may find in the text of that file Exec=geany or similar. Well, just prefix it with sudo and save… Job done.

Simples…

So now I have a graphical package manager, a remote graphical admin tool (webmin) – SCP for accessing files from the PC and UltraVNC to run the graphical environment remotely (sadly, when working with TightVNC it has problems with copy and paste to and from the PC – if anyone knows how to fix that do let me know)

4 thoughts on “The Saturday Catch”

  1. Re graphical package managers. There is always Aptitude if you want some graphical help without going the whole hog on running a desktop. Of course, it is fairly arcane in use 🙁 often easier simply to write down the salient commands for apt and dpkg.

    Even better though, since you are running webmin, why not just do it all through that? I manage my VPS that way, I rarely use a command line on it.

  2. Peter – really enjoy your blog. I seem to be following a path nearly parallel to yours with my home control setup.

    Here’s what I use for VNC cut and paste:

    VNC Cut/Paste –
    First install autocutsel (sudo apt-get install autocutsel)

    Then open your /home/pi/.vnc/xstartup (nano /home/pi/.vnc/xstartup) and add
    line: ‘autocutsel -fork’ (as shown below)
    Then reboot

    ———————–
    /home/pi/.vnc/xstartup:
    ——————————————————————————
    #!/bin/sh

    xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
    xsetroot -solid grey
    autocutsel -fork # <— this is the line that is added
    #x-terminal-emulator -geometry 80×24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
    #x-window-manager &
    # Fix to make GNOME work
    export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
    /etc/X11/Xsession

    -Bob

    1. Thanks for that Bob – I’m sure that will be of assistance to some of the guys in here. For me, I suddenly thought “I’m using TightVNC on the Pi, why don’t I use the same package on the PC – and lo – the copy and paste started working” 🙂

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