Just install Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi 2 but I am not happy with the boot time. It boots directly to the GUI, which is something that I don’t need. So I disabled the GUI boot and timed… Found it takes a good 25 seconds to boot to the terminal. Hum… I don’t think this is good to use Raspberry Pi as a IoT device. Wonder if I can speed up the boot time…
First thing I notice is that NOOBS does takes up times during the boot. Hence, I remove the NOOBS and just install Raspbian OS directly. Raspbian install is not as straight forward as NOOBS install, and here are the steps that I do to make this work.
- Format the SD card again with SD formatter
- on the terminal, type diskutil list and note SD card is /dev/disk5
- do diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk5 to unmount the SD card
- download the Raspbian Lite from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads and unzip it
- sudo dd bs=1m if=2016-03-18-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/rdisk5 (try bs=5m to speed up the process!)
- It takes sometime to write the OS to the SD card. Once this is done, eject the SD card and insert it to Raspberry Pi
After this, I found the initial splash screen is gone and it boots right away. It takes 18 second to boot instead of 25 seconds. That’s pretty good, but not good enough! I will look into what services can be disabled during boot time or use Tiny OS if it is needed.
Configure Wifi Under Command Line
Now that I lost my GUI (which is a good thing,) I need to configure wifi setting under the command line. It is pretty easy and here is how:
vi /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
and add the followings at bottom of the file
network={ ssid="SSID-Name" psk="the-PSK-password" }
and then shutdown -r now to restart the Raspberry Pi to confirm wifi is working.
Interestingly enough, I found SSH to Raspberry Pi’s Wifi IP address does not work. This seems to be a bug. We need to add a line to ssh_config file to make this work:
vi /etc/ssh/ssh_config
and then add this line to the very end:
IPQoS cs0 cs0
Now, restart the service by entering service ssh restart