Wifi and Hope with Raspberry Hopping

I had a theory that if I wanted to I could transport a raspberry pi running ubuntu server from one place to another and connect by wifi, with a little tweak, or by ethernet if that didn’t work and today that thought was proved wrong. I spend at least an hour experimenting, before calling it a day, because of lunch time, rather than a loss of desire to find a solution.

I had the theory that if you plugged an ethernet cable into a Pi it would become visible on the network with ease but this didn’t seem to be the case. The Pi wasn’t happy. It was configured for one wifi hotspot but when I tried to change the config file for a second wifi access point it simply didn’t work.

## Two Things I Learned
There are two things I learned. The first is that raspi-config works when you have Raspian installed. it doesn’t work when you have a flavour of linux installed. The second problem I encountered was that the tools which various sites, including Bard and Chat GPT recommended required a working connection to download the tools that they recommended. I tried this, but had no luck, because for some reason the ethernet network was not detected.

The lesson is that I should download those tools before migrating a Pi from one location to another, so that if I encounter such an issue I have a simpler UI that works, rather than modifying config files by hand, and failing. I wrote failing but this wasn’t a failure. My entire goal was to take a Pi, configured for one environment and transpose it into a second. It didn’t work and I familiarised myself with the tools I need to install before attempting such an experiment again.

## The Beauty of Pi

Don’t forget. One of the strengths of Pi is that you can download instances and install them on microSD cards. You can attempt something with one card, and when it fails swap it for a second and try a variant, until you succeed. If you succeed you can remove that SD card, run an experiment, and see if that experiment works, before reverting to the original card with the install that works.

The beauty of Raspberry Pi, and staring and stopping instances is that you can try various ways of doing the same thing several times, and make mistakes, and invest time in learning how to problem solve, before achieving your goal and moving forward. In this situation the experiment was the goal, so my ideal outcome was not reached, but the opportunity to learn was.

## And Finally

With today’s experiment I learned that to make a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu easier to port from wifi network to wifi network, for example to backup a phone while traveling, I need to add the network manager tools. If I had done that my day’s experiment would have been a success. I also learned that raspi config is not on Ubuntu installs via the Raspberry Pi imager, and this is a useful thing to learn. Now I can see whether I can recover the system before having dinner.