Upgrade/Downgrade to a specific firmware-kernel version with rpi-update in Raspbian

You can upgrade/downgrade to any revision of Raspbians firmware using rpi-update. For example if you want to install revision 3.10.25+ you should execute this:

Plus (+) and At (@) symbols listing file permissions in Mac OS X

The other day I was surprised to see some “plus” (+) and “at” symbols (@) when looking a file list with ls -l:

$ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x+   3 enekochan  staff   102  1 may 18:55 Sites
-rwxrwx---@   1…

Send email with SMTP and Plain Auth via telnet

First connect to the server. It’s usualy on port 25 but this can change from server to server:

telnet server.com 25

Then say hello:

EHLO server.com

Backup and restore hard drive with “dd”

Look for the hard drives device with mount or sudo fdisk -l and unmount it. In my case it's going to be sda.

Backup uncompressed image:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/sda.bin bs=1024

Fix apt-get “cannot copy extracted data for ‘…’ to ‘…’: unexpected end of file or stream”

I was doing an apt-get upgrade and got this error:

Preparing to replace liborc-0.4-0:armhf 1:0.4.16-2 (using…

Stop Spotlight from indexing external hard drive

If you don’t want Spotlight to index an external driver or a USB flash drive you only have to add an empty file called “.metadata_never_index" to the root of the drive. You can do it in the terminal with the touch command. Supposing your…

Configure Raspberry Pi Composite Video Output for old TVs

Raspberry Pi comes with the composite video output configured to NTSC by default and older TVs aren’t able to detect that and change the format to PAL for example. In that case in a PAL TV youl’ll see the image in black and white:

Delete backups after rpi-update

After installing rpi-update:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rpi-update

And doing an update of the firmware and the kernel with it:

sudo rpi-update