I’m currently running three Raspberry Pi projects, with Raspbian as my choice of distribution. One of the machines will be co-located at FS Data and run ownCloud. The other will be handle switching a central heater between oil and electricyty via SMS. The third is a surveillance camera heavily inspired by Dummy camera made smart with Raspberry Pi by my talented colleague Tomas Bjerre.
While examining the default Raspbian image I noticed there were some things I will never use, so I disabled them to free up some RAM:
- Disable the consoles by putting a # in front of all lines containing /sbin/getty in /etc/inittab:
#1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --noclear 38400 tty1
#2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
#3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
#4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
#5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
#6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6
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#T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100If you get into network issues and need the console you can always mount the SD card on another machine and edit the file there!
- If you don’t have a keyboard connected or otherwise don’t want global hotkeys, disable the triggerhappy global hotkey daemon:
sudo update-rc.d triggerhappy disable
- If you have Transmission installed but is not using UPnP, disable the minissdpd daemon for keeping track of UPnP devices:
sudo update-rc.d minissdpd disable
- If you run Apache, disable modules you don’t use. Maybe:
sudo a2dismod dir
sudo a2dismod cgi
sudo a2dismod negotiation
sudo a2dismod autoindex
sudo a2dismod setenvif