I don’t expect much but I found an old pi I bought probably 2016(may of been 2017). It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem. It still works but wanted to somehow convert it to a regular distro(it’s based on a micro-SD and I don’t have any more microsd readers). I wanted to set it up as a basic system I could ssh into a terminal. Not expecting anything fancy or even graphic based. A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice “work” on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible? Am I under estimating what’s possible with it?
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resoundingly yes.
I helped set up many households with kids on Pi-2s and 3s, running Raspbian and Kano. All you needed was a keyboard, mouse, and a monitor. It all worked fine with Scratch, Minecraft, LibreOffice, Web, and email.
At least, until the kids outgrew them.
Yeah I’m thinking my SD card is failing… I know it’s slow but I tried to do a fresh install in recovery 7 hours ago and it’s still initialing the “noob” installer.
Supposedly I was thinking to small, I was thinking like trying to use nmap to discover all ip addresses on my lan or load vim to practice vim motions (I get the idea but I’m still too slow put in alot of commands cause I’m like ok… Up 10 lines, ok, up is… Look on cheat sheet… I… then number of lines… That was 10…look on cheat sheet… Oh just enter 10…it didn’t work… Figure out because it’s not ingrained in my head the time looking at a cheat sheet is making commands time out).
If you want to tinker with a terminal it should do it just fine.
The Pi Hole part is still possible, though. If it is a crappy ISP router then it into a gateway and grab a cheap router on marketplace to do the real work.
Actually, if you are just planning to figure out the basics and not do heavy lifting with it, it would do both just fine. You could learn a bit by getting it configured and keeping it up.
You need an sd card adapter that lets you read and write the sd card from your pc to put an image the pi can boot onto the sd card.
You will need this anyway when you eventually run into the sd card having a bunch of of bad blocks or unreadable sectors.
It will work ”fine” for what you’re describing but consider getting one of those sata/m2 adapter boards so your root filesystem isn’t based on the media explicitly designed for temporarily holding information until the user can get back to a computer.
If you already have a computer, just set up a vm.
Yes you can do loads with your Raspberry Pi. Certainly you can install ARM based linux distros onto it, but with an older model you’re best using a Pi specific linux distro.
The official Raspberry Pi OS is linux and is compatible with all Raspberry Pi models - there is a universal 32bit version and a 64bit version for newer models 3+.
There is also Dietpi which tries to be more lightweight and optimised.
You can image either distro onto an SD card and run it on the Pi. If you connect the pi to your network you can run it headless and access it via SSH on your PC.
However, if you main aim is to learn and play with Linux, then it is worth considering alternatives. For example, you could install VirtualBox on your Windows PC, and create a virtual PC to run any X86 linux distro you’d like on it. That can include small systems with command line only or a full desktop environment of your choice. That would likely give you much higher performance and options than a 10 year old raspberry pi can offer.
The Pi is good if you want an always on server device to play with Linux on. The Virtual machine route is good if you want a more powerful system to play with occasionally when you feel like it.
Yeah, I tried virtual box on my main system and kept running into odd problems with every distro. For example Debian had a full second of input lag, with 2 cores of a 13th Gen i5 and 16 gb of ram dedicated to it. Kali would install and I ejected the “installation medium” aka the iso and reboot and the virtual box couldn’t see any bootable drive. I tried fedora and it kept freezing on installing(sat at like 35% for over 3 hours)
