First Steps

Don’t reinvent the wheel.
It’s probably been done before.
Check YouTube.

I wanted a way to show & share images across my local network without having to start my main PC. I started with 1 Raspberry Pi 5 (some assembly required); the free Raspberry PI Imager (OS); and some websites & YouTube channels for guidance.

Little did I know the door that opened or how glad I’d be I took that first step. One unanticipated side benefit(?) is this website. It is operating on the first Pi, sitting on the corner of my office desk, sipping power and providing services 24×7, but that’s a story for later, this story is about getting that first Pi up and running.

The Pi 5 is the first Pi with a PCIe bus that you can plug real storage hardware into, like SSDs. Thankfully Pis are well supported and have an active community. One Pi guru, Jeff Greeling has a great step by step tutorial on booting your Pi from an NVME drive or you can watch it on his YouTube channel

At this point I had a Pi that could boot up and had lots of storage, but no apps and no way to access the storage. I knew I wanted to “show” my pictures from the Pi, but first I had to get them there.

Some research showed that Samba was what I needed to drag and drop from my Windows PC to a file-share location on the Pi. One speed bump in this was finding out the hard way the ‘root’ user on the Pi, the first logged in user, cannot be used as the owner of the connection or storage target on the Pi, this is for security reasons; a new user is required.

This is also a good time to point out that Linux has a totally different security structure for files and ownership & permissions. When something doesn’t go right, the first place to start is with permissions. Either the user doesn’t have permission to write to the location or doesn’t have permission to read or execute the file. These will stop you in your tracks every time.

Thankfully, if an internet search or YouTube video doesn’t enlighten you there are a couple of personal assistants you can call on, they have been immensely helpful to me; Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini.

I’ve typed and spoken my queries; I’ve even taken screen shots with my cell phone and pasted the resulting image into the AI prompt. It was able to ‘read’ the lines of error code in the picture and tell me the problem and offer a solution.

I’ve given it a few variables like database name, user and password and it will use those to produce a script to install an application.

I would be much closer to my beginning steps than I am to my end steps without the help of AI. If you haven’t tried, download one of the apps from your app store and give it a whirl, much better than doom scrolling.