[GTALUG] Beginner Debian Question(s)

[Peter King]

I recently acquired a Roseapple Pi board, for which a system image based on
Debian 8.1 "Jessie" is provided.

This system image boots into an LXDE environment, with no option to boot to
the console (i.e. the CLI without all the GUI stuff).  I have no idea how
to get it to boot to the console -- it doesn't seem to use GRUB(2) as the
bootloader, so there is no menu option at boot.  I tried to use sudo to get
rid of lightdm, but was told that I'm not in the sudoers group, even after
changing my user privileges to "Administrator".  Naturally, I don't have a
root password.

Searching on Google generally suggests that it's way complicated now to
just boot to console in Debian.  That seems ridiculous.  But then again,
I don't understand anything about systemd or the "new" and "improved" way
of doing things.  Oh, and basic tools like lsusb don't seem to be installed
by default.

All this is exacerbated by the fact that Debian somehow doesn't recognize
my wireless dongle (it uses an RTL 8192 chip), even though it's supposed
to, and I have no ethernet connection to the net.

I haven't been this frustrated by a linux distro in a long time.  My idea
of a good time is running dwm on a gentoo system, and LXDE looks like a bad
knockoff of a premodern version of Windows.

Any suggestions?  (Apart from, "Drop the whole thing from a tall building"
which has its attractions.)

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king at utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-3311 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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