Essential first steps on a fresh BeagleBone Black

You should complete the following steps in order to make the BeagleBone only accessible to you, and to make Ubuntu a bit friendlier.

Creating a new user and deleting the standard user

Assuming you are connected to the BeagleBone via ssh, you can create a new user by issuing the following command:

sudo adduser bob

Enter a Password and as much personal information as you want. Give the new user adminastration rights by adding him to the sudoers

sudo visudo

If you don't want to be bothered with password questions all the time, append the line

bob All=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

to the file. Alternatively, you can make the line look like

bob ALL=(ALL) ALL

This asks you for the password when you use the sudo command. It is considered more safe.

Save the file by simultaneously pressing CTRL+O. Then exit the editor with the command CTRL+X.
You are back in the terminal. Now switch to the freshly created user by running

su bob

Congratulations! You now have your very own user account.
Try to make a test file to see if you have user rights.

sudo touch test_file

Now check if this file is there:

ls -la

You should see something like

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 12 11:20 a

The middle part confirms that the file belongs to the user "root" and to the group "root".

Logout of the session as the new user "bob" by typing

exit

and then out of the ssh session as ubuntu by typing

exit

again. Then do a fresh login as the new user bob, using ssh (see above). Now, as the user "bob", do:

ps aux | grep ubuntu

to see if the old user has any processes running. If so, kill them using

sudo pkill <process-name>
# or
sudo pkill -15 <process-id>

Then remove the default user using

sudo userdel ubuntu
sudo rm -r /home/ubuntu

The last command removes the home directory of ubuntu, which is not needed anymore. Caution: It can delete other things, if you don't type it exactly as shown.

Updating the software

Update your system

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Press enter whenever it asks if it should proceed

Install the man-pages

Install manual pages

sudo apt-get install man-db

Read your first manual page

man rm

This is the manual page for the "remove" command.

Type /prompt and press ENTER to search for the word "prompt" in this manual page.
Type / and press ENTER to search for the next instance of the word "prompt".
Use the arrow-up and arrow-down, page-up and page-down keys to scroll up and down.
Type q to quit viewing this manual page.

Updating the system time

Update the system time.

sudo ntpdate ptbtime2.ptb.de

Set the correct timezone

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata