Les Pounder is getting to an age where things need to be simple, so when someone said “Keep It Simple, Stupid”, he took no offence.
PiKISS from Jose Cerrejon is not just a clever name. The acronym KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) has been adopted by many products, but rarely does it work as well as this. PiKISS has been around for a couple of years and Cerrejon has poured a lot of time and energy into the project, so it has grown into a collection of tools that every Pi user needs. Compatible with every model of Pi and Raspberry Pi OS and Twister OS, PiKISS is installed via a one-line Bash script and can be found in the System Tools menu. It uses an Ncurses user interface via the terminal; we don’t need a complex UI, just a series of menus, grouped by themes. From the top of the list we see Tweaks, and here is where we can run a few wizards to remove unwanted default OS services and features. Tweaking swap files, generating SSH keys, even enabling compressed RAM disks (ZRAM) are all possible via this menu.
Via the Multimedia menu, we can install Kodi, OBS or streaming media services. There is also an option to use Moonlight, an alternative to Steam Link, for bringing your PC games into the living room. Talking of games, there are two menus to accommodate retro gamers. The first, Games, contains a few Linux games, but the most interesting part are the installers for classic games from the late ’90s and early 2000s. If you want to play Half-Life on a Raspberry Pi, with PiKISS you can. All you need is your original discs. Install via PiKISS and you can save the Earth from your favourite single-board computer. The other gaming menu, Emulation, contains emulators for the classic consoles. From old Atari consoles, arcade cabinets to the PS2 (is that retro now?), you can play them all. You still need to have your own ROMs and BIOS for the emulators as PiKISS does not supply those.
Under Info, we can find tools to check o
