Raspberry Pi(rate)Box Troubleshooting

Technical FAQ

Enabling PirateBox for startup seems not to work.

Some USB Sticks take a while until they are available. PirateBox Scripts try initialize the wifi card directly. If the card is not available, it can be useful to enable a wait-time until the device become available. To enable this device-polling run

sed -i 's|PROBE_INTERFACE="no"|PROBE_INTERFACE="yes"|g' /opt/piratebox/conf/piratebox.conf

The next reboot should work. If not, please report back to the forums.


PirateBox does not work after system upgrade

The PirateBox RaspberryPi images are Archlinux based. In case you want to install additional software, it might be handy to run the upgrade commands:

pacman -Syu

Sometimes the packages changes, so recently the dnsmasq package will now auto enable itself. So make sure that dnsmasq is properly disabled and stopped after installing your software:

systemctl stop dnsmasq
systemctl disable dnsmasq

You might consider restarting PirateBox after your activities:

systemctl restart piratebox


Additional Support

For general questions about the PirateBox project, please refer to the FAQ page.

For additional support, please visit the PirateBox Forum.

Please note: Before posting on the forum, please review this article on “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way”.

Key recommendations include:

  • Use meaningful, specific subject headers
  • Be explicit about your question
  • Be precise and informative about your problem
  • Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework
  • Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses
  • Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order
  • Describe the goal, not the step
  • Don't ask people to reply by private e-mail or private message
  • Courtesy never hurts, and sometimes helps
  • Follow up with a brief note on the solution if you find one