Give your Raspberry Pi a fixed IP address

Having a fixed (or static) IP address on your Raspberry Pi, comes in handy if you want to access your Raspberry Pi from the internet (for a how to about port forwarding, read this article). As you might want to use ownCloud for instance.

You can give your Raspberry Pi a fixed IP address by editting the network interfaces file.

But first, we are making a backup of the old configuration!

sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.bak

 

Next thing is, editing the network interfaces file:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

 

Although the IP address you want to use might be different, make your /etc/network/interfaces look like this:

auto eth0                                     # The loopback interface

iface eth0 inet static              # Tells your Raspberry Pi to use a static IP address

address 192.168.2.25            # Defines the static ip address
gateway 192.168.2.1              # Defines the gateway to use (choose the IP address of your modem)
netmask 255.255.255.0     # Defines the subnet mask

network 192.168.2.0             # Defines the network family
broadcast 192.168.2.255    # Defines the network family

 

You can save the adjustments you made to your /etc/network/interfaces file by pressing ctrl o

Press ctrl x to exit

 

After saving your new settings, you need to activate them by restarting your network components:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

 

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Getting Broadcom STA to work on Ubuntu Studio 13.04 or Xubuntu

As I upgraded Ubuntu Studio 12.10 to Ubuntu Studio 13.04 on my Mac Book 5.1 my wireless stopped working… After surfing the internet for a couple of days I’ve found the following solution to enable the Broadcom STA on my Mac Book 5.1.

Check whether Ubuntu sees your Broadcom STA device by running the lspci command from a terminal:

lspci | grep Network

 

After using the the lspci command you should get something like this:

03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)

 

Next up is, installing the drivers. To install the drivers run the following command using the terminal:

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

 

The broadcom-sta-common package, blacklists the b43 driver.

To fix this you need to edit the file: /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf

 

You can do that by using the following command in the terminal:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf

 

Delete or comment out with a “#” the line “blacklist b43”, my file looks like this:

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with the following modules:
# blacklist b43
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b44
blacklist bcma
blacklist brcm80211
blacklist brcmsmac
blacklist ssb

 

Then to force the module to load during boot by using the following command in the terminal:

sudo nano /etc/modules

 

Then add a line with “b43”, my /etc/modules file looks like this:

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with “#” are ignored.
lp
rtc
b43

 

You don’t need to reboot your computer as you can load the module manually by entering the following command in the terminal:

sudo modprobe b43

 

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Remove X or create a headless server on a Raspberry Pi

As I use my Raspberry Pi as a headless server, I thought it would be a good idea to clean up unnecessary files. After studying some material from others and several attempts later, I distilled the following steps…

Login to your Raspberry Pi, so open a terminal and use SSH…

Step – 1: To get rid of orphaned files later, we are going to install a program called deborphan first:

sudo apt-get install deborphan

 

Step – 2: Next we are going to remove all desktops from your Raspbian (if you don’t want to remove samba, remove it from the following command!):

sudo apt-get remove –auto-remove –purge libx11-.* lxde-.* raspberrypi-artwork xkb-data omxplayer penguinspuzzle sgml-base xml-core cifs-.* samba-.* fonts-.* desktop-* gnome-.*

 

Step – 3: Now we are going to remove all orphaned files:

sudo apt-get remove –purge $(deborphan)

 

Step – 4: After that it is time to remove the unnecessary packages that are not orphaned:

sudo apt-get autoremove

 

Step – 5: You can even free up more space by removing the locales:

sudo apt-get install locale:purge:
sudo localepurge

 

Step – 6: Clean up some more:

sudo apt-get clean

 

Step – 7: You might need to reinstall the following packages for squeezelite:

sudo apt-get install -y libflac-dev libfaad2 libmad0

 

Step – 8: Reboot If you want, else stop start the service:

sudo shutdown -r now

 

By doing a “before and after“, you can see the difference:

df -h /dev/root

 

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How to EQ vocals

Of course there is no exhaustive and conclusive answer to “how to EQ vocals“, but there are some guidelines you can follow and that offer you reasonable results even if you’re not into audio.

You can use the following 4 steps within your audio package of choice.

Step 1 – Remove low frequency rumble
Set your “High Pass Filter” somewhere between 80 and 120 Hz

Step 2 – Add more freshness to audio track
Top shelf, boosting high from 8 kHz with 1 to 6 db (if you want to do it subtle: 12 – 16 kHz)

Step 3 – Reduce offending frequencies
Sweep your vocal track by using a small bell curve, to find offending frequencies round 800 – 1 kHz and reduce them by -3 db

Step 4 – Make vocals more outstanding
Boost the vocal presence in your mix, by boosting the range between 2 – 5 kHz with 1 to 4 db

 

EXTRA:

  • With everything you do while EQ ing your audio, listen carefully to the results!
  • Never work on your original files, always use a copy!

 

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Backing up and restoring software installations in Ubuntu

Sometimes you just want to restore (or clone) your favorite (studio ;-)) installation, to a clean installed, freshly formatted machine, without having to  install manually all your favorite applications again.

This can be done, by exporting the list of all your installed applications to a text file and reinstall all your applications listed in the text file to your freshly formatted machine (as Hannibal would have said “I love it when a plan comes together“).

First create a text file in your ‘Home’ folder containing a list of all your applications of your favorite (studio ;-)) installation. Open a terminal window:

sudo dpkg –get-selections > app-backup-list.txt

 

Next copy the file “app-backup-list.txt” from your ‘Home’ folder to your freshly formatted machine (your ‘Home’ folder will do ;-). Now to restore your applications, open a terminal window:

sudo dpkg –get-selections < app-backup-list.txt
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

 

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