This article was meant to be a brief piece on how to mount an external USB drive, but it quickly spiralled out when I started writing about all the nuances and potential issues one might encounter. So I have a created a quick summary of the commands on how to mount a drive below. But I highly recommend reading the rest of the article as there are a number of potential pitfalls with the Pi and external USB drives that are addressed.

VPN or a Virtual Private Network is a common way of securing an Internet connection using encryption.

Basically a VPN sets a trusted, designated server on the Internet to act as a man in the middle. As a VPN client, all your web traffic gets encrypted and directed to this designated machine. It decrypts and then reroutes the traffic to its intended destination. This gives you a both benefits and disadvantages.

I love the Linux shell. While cryptic and horribly daunting for a first time user the text only command line offers an amazing amount of flexibility and power without the need to actually develop or code. Yet unlike a graphical user interface of which I don’t tend to like in Linux. The text shell is fast and allows you to remotely connect to a headless device with the bare minimum of configuration.

This tutorial is a step-by-step walk through on getting MAME running on a Raspberry Pi. This guide is from November 2012 and parts of it maybe out of date if you are reading it at a later time. As of writing, software, operating systems and drivers for the Pi is quite young and constantly evolving so some of the solutions used here I consider as hacks and are not best practise.

This mini-entry is a supplemental article for first time Raspberry Pi owners using Windows PCs who are reading my MAME Arcade Game Fun With A Raspberry Pi article. This article not intended to be read stand-alone.

Using the Linux terminal (command line) I am going to explain in thorough detail the mysteries that are the Linux system file permissions for the uninitiated. I will be using Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS but most of what is covered should be applicable for any POSIX compatible Linux, Mac OS or Unix environment.