Raspberry Pi Zero First Time Setup

I recommend that the best way to setup a raspberry pie is by using a KVM switch. That way you can easily switch back and forth to your windows machine for reference.

1 Move the panel to the bottom with large icons.

Right click and choose 

Add a few useful panel items:

CPU Temperature Monitor
CPU Frequency Front End

Appearance Settings System

2 Reduce the screen resolution to 1280 x 720

Overclock:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

change line to arm_freq=1200
over_voltage=4

Install Pi Apps link

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Botspot/pi-apps/master/install | bash

Add items to the launch bar

Right click the launch bar and use Add Remove

Use ZRam link 

Clone the zram-swap script from its GitHub repository by running the following command on your Raspberry Pi.

git clone https://github.com/foundObjects/zram-swap

change to the directory containing the script we just cloned.

cd zram-swap

Now that we are in the correct directory, we can run the zram-swap script to install itself.

This install script will set up the service that will create the zram disk at startup.

The script will also set it up so that the operating system will use that zram disk as a part of the swap memory.

sudo ./install.sh

By default, this script will replace half of your memory with the zram disk and compressing the data using the LZ4 compression algorithm.

The lz4 compression algorithm is the best compromise between performance and compression rate, especially for a low powered device such as the Raspberry Pi.

Verifying your Raspberry Pi’s zram

Now that we have run the install script, we should verify that our Raspberry Pi now has access to our zram swap.

Luckily the operating system has several built-in features that allow us to check our swap memory status quickly .

Retrieving the status of your Raspberry Pi’s zram swap is a simple process.

All you need to do is run the following command to return the “/proc/swaps” file’s contents.

This file contains the information about your swap files, including their type, size, and priority.

sudo cat /proc/swaps

Using the previous command, you should see something as we have below.

You should have two swap files. One is the default one that is present on your filesystem itself.

The second one is the zram disk that we created that exists within the RAM on your Raspberry Pi.

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/var/swap                               file            102396  0       -2
/dev/zram0                              partition       4899744 0       5

You can see the zram disk named as “/dev/zram0“, the size is displayed in kilobytes and will be different depending on your Raspberry Pi.

You should also note that its priority is higher than the disk-based swap. This ensures the operating system uses our zram disk before resorting to the slower disk-based swap.

Conclusion

At this stage, you should have got your Raspberry Pi set up with a swap partition using zram.

This zram being compressed allows you to fit more data within your Pi’s RAM. This increase comes at the cost of CPU usage whenever it is accessed.

Using zram is incredibly useful for squeezing out more memory from your device. It allows you to extend your older Raspberry Pi’s lifespan by enabling it to squeeze more out of its memory.

Add some Pi Apps

LightPad 

Add Puffin Browser
Add Firefox Browser

Fix screen tearing

sudo rm /etc/xdg/autostart/xcompmgr.desktop