The project is still under development and the only way to try it out, is by compiling it yourself, which will probably turn off the majority of interested parties.

I was most interested in becoming a “farmer” and earning SafeCoins by leaving my Raspberry Pi connected to the Safe (Secure Access For Everyone) Network, but after completing everything, I was left not knowing what to do.  It is confusing because the maidsafe.net Website makes it seem like you can already easily get involved, but I think they are just in the testing phases still.

I compiled some instructions from different sources to try to figure it out, so maybe this will help someone else, but don’t think I was successful because I had no idea if it was working or not.  I will probably just wait to download the software once the company does a public release.

Rescources

• http://raspberrymaidsafe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/installing-maidsafe-on-raspberry-pi.html
• https://github.com/maidsafe/MaidSafe/wiki/Build-Instructions-for-Linux

Expand The Filesystem

If you have a smaller SD card, you will want to expand the filesystem or you might run out of space during the upgrade.  Choose Expand filesystem from the menu after running this command:

sudo raspi-config

Upgrade wheezy to jessie

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Modify the word wheezy to say jessie:

deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi

Now run the upgrade

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Decide RootPasswordAuthentication

A prompt will appear asking about disabling password authentication for root over SSH.  Most of the time, you will just choose yes here, unless you ever want to log in as root using password authentication.  But it is safer to choose yes, as it will help prevent brute force attacks.  Plus, if you already set up a password-less login for the Pi, this is a good option.

sudo rpi-update sudo reboot

Install the required libraries

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential python-psutil libfuse-dev git-all libicu-dev valgrind binutils-gold

Add A SSH Key To Github

Follow the instructions to add a SSH key to your Github account.  This will be used to securely clone Cmake.

Compile Cmake from source

It does take quite a while for the following commands to run

git clone git://cmake.org/cmake.git
cd cmake
git checkout v2.8.12.2
./bootstrap --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Download And Configure The MaidSafe Source Code

Securely, download the source code from Github, utilizing your SSH key from the previous step.

cd git clone git@github.com:maidsafe/MaidSafe 
git -C MaidSafe submodule update --initcmake -H~/MaidSafe/MaidSafe -Bbuild_maidsafe -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug 
cmake MaidSafe/

Create A Big Swap File

Since the Raspberry Pi has only 512MB of RAM, create some extra swap space.dd

if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/swapfile bs=1M count=1024 
mkswap /path/to/swapfile swapon /path/to/swapfile

So What Now?

I wish I knew.  I set out to do this with the intention of earning a SafeCoin.  Users who provide storage for the SAFE network, earn SafeCoins.  But I’m not really certain that my Pi is doing anything.  I have since turned it off and plan to just download the software once they release it.