Learning

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. With some distributions you download it, install and it’s easy. With NixOS it took some searching to find the right ISO image that I also had to download a tool to unzip.

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. I find a podcast that I like and I listen to the most recent episodes and then I listen to them in chronological order. This takes a lot of time, but it also provides me with an evolutionary appreciation of how things have changed.

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. It’s by a little trial and error that I suceeded in what I wanted to do.

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. So far I feel that a Pi running Ubuntu can run Nextcloud, PhotoPrism and be used to write a blog post simultaneously.

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.

Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.

I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them. I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi 8GB. I chose this device because it’s the highest spec pi available at the moment without months of waiting. I could have used an HP Elite Book from several years ago but I want a machine that can be on permanently.

For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.

When walking and listening to the 2.5 Admins I heard about the concept of going from treating servers as pets to treating them as cattle. They discussed the habit of giving servers functional names, rather than emotional ones. The examples were similar to DR-1 for for Disaster Recovery one, prod 1 for production one and related names.

Servers as Cattle, Not Pets

They spoke about the legacy habit of building a server up over a period of years to the modern habit of spinning up instances and containers that can easily be replicated within minutes, independent of hardware. They spoke about the need to take notes and set up an environment once, and then destroy it, and set it up again, and to follow the notes exactly. The concept is that you don’t set something up just once, you set it up over and over, and over again, until you have the work flow perfected, and written down, for repeatability, three years down the line.