A newbies experience trying to setup Pirate Box on RPi 2

The following is simply one newbies experience. It's not meant as a criticism; more as an insight for those who do this kind of stuff so much they forget what it's like for the inexperienced user.

Following along with the instructions on the website have not got me even a working SD card to boot my RPi 2 with....

I've tried 4+ times, using 2 different SD cards (one fresh out of the box to make sure the other one wasn't just corrupt), and tried setting up the IMG on both windows and mac.

I've tried using Pi Filler, Pi Writer 2, and Win 32 Disk Imager to install the Arch Linux distro that the site links me too. None of them worked for me.

One of the things that us newbies find a little problematic is when we're told a file is going to be named something, but it's not. For example on the Piratebox site it says the IMG file should be called "ArchLinuxARM-2014.10-PirateBox*.zip" ... except it's not. The "image" is called "raw_arch_image_file".

I assumed that was the correct file since it was the only one there, but it wasn't what this noob was expecting.

The reason I put "image" above in quotes is because my Win 32 DiskImager and 2 of the 3 Mac apps I ran (all of which were suggested scripts linked to from PirateBox) didn't recognize the file as an image.... According to these programs this file had no extension at all.

As a novice, it took me a while to realize this problem and add .img to the end of the file... but even when I did that and Win 32 DiskImager did write it as an IMG to my SD card... It still didn't work.

Correction, still doesn't work.

Right now, I'm currently putting Raspian from NOOBS on my RPi 2 just to make sure the problem is something with the Piratebox IMG and not my SD card.

The Raspian install is going smoothly.

I still love the Pirate Box project and am trying to use Wheezy to get it to work.

I hope my experience is helpful to the Piratebox team and gives you insight into some of the problems and frustrations of a novice user.

Good luck

Hi fostejam,

it seems your start wasn't a great experience at all.
The piratebox for raspberry pi was developed long before we all know about RPi 2 and there was no reason to place a note beside the download instruction, it would only work with older Raspberry Pi.
The ARCHLinux Version we use is made for ARM v6 CPU only and will not work with the new ARMv7 CPU which is used in the new RPi 2.

We want to create an image for the RPi 2, too. But this takes some time and we everything regarding piratebox in our spare time.

As I understand, you would like to have a detailed step by step tutorial for setting up a piratebox which is less confusing for newbies.
I put this on my todo list.

Thank you for you feedback.

BlueSpider

Thanks for taking the time to read that BlueSpider.

As I keep working on getting this working on my RPi 2, I'll try to document what I do as much as possible to hopefully make it of use to you (and others) in the future.

I love this project and look forward to making it work.

Hopefully you will consider a note next to the Arch Linux install about it not being compatible with RPi 2 since it's likely most people are buying the 2 instead of the 1 now a days.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2015 03:00AM by fostejam.