Last night I started to install wordpress on the Pi5 and I got it to work. I then started to install ClassicPress via the ClassicPress switchtoclassicpress plugin and got blocked. I was blocked because in order for WordPress to update plugins, themes and wordpress it needs to have access to itself via FTP. That’s when I stopped for the night.
VSFTPD This morning I installed vsftpd and the first part went well.
Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked.
At first Debian was running in command line mode so I took the time to install the KDE desktop and that’s when I ran into the same limitation of the Pi4.
During the weekend it was warm and beautiful. It was so warm and beautiful that my bag got to 40+ degrees centigrade, with an average of over 30°c. Today as I drove to the shops for food I noticed that the snow line was even lower.
Yesterday it was on the top of the Jura, around La Dole, and today it’s down two thirds of the mountain. It’s cold enough to feel cold when walking.
For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me.
What I Struggled With The first thing I struggled with was finding a version of NixOS that played nicely with Pi’s processor.
Recently I have been listening to plenty of Late Night Linux podcasts. I like them because they’re half an hour long, the adverts are half way through the show, and in general I don’t feel that they’re filling time to fill one and a half hours of podcast time.
Plenty of other podcasts last for an hour and a half or more, which if you listen to one episode a week is okay, but I don’t do that.
There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.
This morning I made PhotoPrism self-booting. I am not certain that this is the write term so I will specify what I mean. PhotoPrism, when run via docker boots, when we tell it to boot, like any other app on our laptop. This morning, after a little time spent with AI I found the solution.
I used ChatGPT for this help but this is to give you an idea of how to enable docker containers to boot automatically rather than manually.
While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with.
Installing the OS is easy. Download NixOS, flash it to a USB stick, reboot a computer onto the OS on that USB stick and begin installation of the OS.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using.
The Pi 5 feels comfortable I have loaded several webpages at once, in various tabs, tried importing images via photoprism, whilst writing this blog post and running VS Code.
Since getting the Raspberry Pi devices my shift has moved from following tutorial after tutorial to experimenting with setting up a number of server projects fron Home Assistant to Nextcloud to Photoprism and Immich to name a few. In the process I have instantiated and then pulled down plenty of instances before finally deciding to keep certain instances up and running for longer, to see whether I can use them. I also experimented with CUPS and set up a printer/scanner for remote use.