How to make a Pi-Top more Raspbian

By R. S. Doiel, 2016-07-04

I have a first generation Pi-Top. I like the idea but found I didn’t use it much due to a preference for basic Raspbian. With the recent Pi-TopOS upgrades I realized getting back to basic Raspbian was relatively straight forward.

The recipe

1. Make sure you’re running the latest Pi-TopOS based on Jessie
2. Login into your Pi-Top normally
3. From the Pi-Top dashboard select the “Desktop” icon
4. When you see the familiar Raspbian desktop click on the following things
   • Click on the Raspberry Menu (upper left corner)
   • Click on Preferences
   • Click on Raspberry Pi Configuration
5. I made the following changes to my System configuration
   • Under Boot I selected “To CLI”
   • I unchecked login as user “pi”
6. Restart your Pi Top
   • Click on Raspberry Menu in the upper left of the desktop
   • Click on shutdown
   • Select reboot
7. When you restart you’ll see an old school console login, login as the pi user using your Pi-Top password
8. Remove the following program use the apt command
   • ceed-universe
   • pt-dashboard
   • pt-splashscreen

    sudo apt purge ceed-universe pt-dashboard pt-splashscreen

Note: pi-battery, pt-hub-controller, pt-ipc, pt-speaker are hardware drivers specific to your Pi-Top so you probably want to keep them.