I often have the need to spin up a Linux host to perform some quick testing for something, and the amount of legwork and time to get a simple VM up and running is often as time-consuming as getting the software installed to interact with it. I needed something that was quicker to get me bootstrapped, simple enough to not require me to learn a whole ton to get going, and repeatable enough for me to even write some dirty scripts to make standing something up repeatable.
So I got a couple of these fantastic little embedded systems from Next Thing, and started to try to set one of them up how I would like to see it setup. Basically I was looking for a web browser, SSH installed, and a few aliases to make things easy to work with.
NOTE: All of the operations below assume a basic understanding of terminal commands!
Updating the PocketCHIP and installing the software To start off, the PocketCHIP OS is slightly out of date as it’s currently being flashed, so the first thing we need to do is update the OS to current: