How many computers do you have at hand. Years ago I used to have two computers. A Mac Book Air and a Mac Book Pro. Eventually I sold the Mac Book Air and just used the Pro. I went to an event with the Pro and it was stolen so for a few days I was without any computer.
I then bought a much cheaper Mac Book Pro and since then my collection of computers has grown.
For a while I was thinking of moving from MacOS on the MacBook Pro to Ubuntu on the MacBook Pro and I prepared a remote boot option for this to be possible. Eventually I changed my mind and finally installed Ubuntu on the Windows HP machine. There are two reasons for this.
The first reason for which I decided to install Ubuntu on my HP laptop is that when I tried to play audio and use wifi on the Mac book pro there were issues.
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.
This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.
There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake.
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.
Yesterday I watched a video about setting up a Mini Nextcloud Server on a Pi 5 so I experimented with using the Pi-Hosted script to install docker and then portainer. Pi Hoster uses two scripts. One installs Docker and the second one installs Portainer. Portainer is a web interface to install docker containers instead of doing the same thing via the command line. It allows you to install Pi-Hole, Ad Guard, PhotoPrism, Nextcloud and many other solutions on a single server with relative ease.
Recently I have been sliding between Windows, Linux distributions and MacOS throughout the day. I use a mac for blogging, and Linux to experiment and learn new skills, and windows to watch Netflix and YouTube. I might be over-simplifying but that’s the simplified version.
Pi and Linux I find that I have come to be at ease in all three environments, especially since playing around with Raspberry Pi devices. “Why?”, you may ask.
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.