Build your own netbeast router

---

What is the Netbeast router

Is a new kind of router where you can install apps. It is open and built entirely using web technologies and powered by Raspberry Pi. You can make apps and test them on your local machine, fast and cheap, and then deploy them to our marketplace.

What is Netbeast os?

Netbeast os is a ripped raspbian distribution with a user-friendly dashboard that you can use to install, buy (in development) and manage applications.

How do I make my own Netbeast router from a Raspberry Pi?

The very basic setup is just a single Raspberry Pi, but to enjoy most of the beta version's features you may need all these…

Ingredients:

2 WiFi Dongles, 1 SD/microSD card, 1 Raspberry Pi A/B/B+/2

Netbeast os distro — get it here.

[micro] SD/microSD card to install it. We recommend minimum a 4Gb card.

One WiFi dongle. Make it two if you want to use the Netbeast router as a network gateway.

The Raspiberry Pi (any of models A/B/B+ (for Netbeast os for Rpi 1) and model 2 (for Netbeast os for Rpi2)

Burn xyos image to SD (from Linux or Mac OS)

• Format the card before install the distro. In Mac OS you can use Disk Utility and from Linux Gparted (you can find loads of other tools to do this).
• We encourage you to login as root. This will avoid you typing sudo before each command. Try executing “su root" and entering root as the password.

1. Insert your SD card and run this command through the console:

sudo df -h
# You will see your SD identifier. It should be something like
# "mmcbl*" or "sd*", in Linux. From a macbook I can read 
# "/dev/disks1" after formatting the SD with Disk Utility

2. Unmount partitions before burning the Netbeast-os.img you downloaded from SourceForge [http://j.mp/xyos-for-rpi2]. If you have more than one, unmount all of them.

# umount /dev/[partition identifier] identifier. In my case:
umount /dev/disk1s1

3. Burn the image to the SD card.

sudo dd bs=4M if=xyos-v0.01.img of=/dev/disk1 # Without partition number

4. Run:

sync

First boot

Welcome to Netbeast :]

If you are using one WiFi dongle you will be able to connect to your brand new Netbeast router through its PAN or Personal Area Network. You should see “netbeast-xy” at your wireless connection panel. Go ahead, the password its “netbeast”. You should be able to change it as we have prepared several scripts and an awesome app to make it easier, but we’ll take a look on that later. If you also have it connected through ethernet you got a beautiful out-of-the-box WiFi repeater.

netbeast-xy will spawn automatically out-of-the-box

Go show what you are doing to family, friends or reach us at twitter! @netbeast_co.

If you are not using any WiFi module but you have connected it through Ethernet you can find its ip with nmap:

nmap -p 22 --open -sV 192.168.0.0/24 
# Or your network ip, which may be normally 192.168.0.0/24,
# 192.168.1.0/24 or 172.16.0.0/26

And, finally, in case you don’t have either an ethernet connection you can use xyos through its terminal connecting it a keyboard and a screen. You could also choose not to do any of this so you can have a geeky brick. Hurray!

Eat the dessert first.

If you are connected through “netbeast-xy” WiFi PAN you can open your favourite browser and type http://home.netbeast (you can fallback to it’s running ip in the netbeast-xy network: http://10.0.0.1, or the ip you found with nmap) and you should see a Dashboard like this one:

Go play.

(We will explain how to write your first app in the next post)

I want my command line back.

We wanted to make xyos useful even without the dashboard. Lots of times we want a light OS to develop or host services in a Rpi, but we rather find a distro heavy or lacking certain packages. We ensure a medium size distribution full of the most popular dev tools: python, nodejs and others.

Connecting through ssh –or login with keyboard + screen– follows the same process as usual. We decided to keep the same username and password as with raspbian in order not to make you remember anything else. This user and pass is all over internet and makes us happy.

ssh pi@home.netbeast # Or the ip you found before with nmap
# username: pi
# password: raspberry

You also may also feel tempted to overclock it. You may experience a slightly better performance but we strongly discourage it. It is not worth risking your Rpi processor for little to no improvement.

---

We are currently at beta release. We have a lot of work before us, but it is our goal to create a quality dashboard to install and run applications so we are very pleased if you decide to share a bit of your time with us providing all the feedback you may have. Thank you for getting here and please, please. Contact us if you get an error anywhere and we’ll try to fix it. Or just make a suggestion, a comment or tweet so we can add a feature for future releases.

Thanks.

Sincerely, the netBeast staff.

xyos Download Netbeast os.http://j.mp/xyos-for-rpi2

#startup #distro #beta #raspberry #raspbian #maker #iot #html5

PS: If you had any problems or you find a mistake anywhere in this tutorial, please reach us through twitter, facebook, github or this post.

Written with ❤ by Luis F. Pinto & Jesús D. Rivera.