My server mysteriously stopped working in December. After a scheduled restart, the OS wouldn’t load so the fan was running on high for a few days while I was staying at a friends for a few days.

I checked the logs and couldn’t find anything suspicious. Loaded a previous backup that worked and still nothing loaded on startup. Tested the Pi 5 with a USB drive that had a fresh Alpine Linux install on it and everything loaded up fine so I was able to rule out any hardware issues. The HDD with the old OS mounted just fine to my laptop. I still have no idea what happened.

This happened a few days before my domain name expired and I was planning to change my domain name to something shorter. Decided to hold off on remaking my server from scratch until I finish a few other projects.

The other projects will help me manage my network connected devices so it’s all working towards a common goal. Fortunately I am getting very close to finishing those projects. I am putting the final touches on my last project and should done within a few days.

Next I’ll reinstall my Pi 4 with HomeAssistant again to fix it’s networking issue. Only the terrarium grow lights are affected and my gecko chose to hibernate outside of the terrarium this winter so she’s unaffected (heat lamps are controlled by a separate, isolated device). After that I’ll fix my Pi 5 server and this time go with Podman over Docker.

It’s been a learning experience. I am pretty much building it specifically for my use so it’s missing lots of stuff that’s standard on other fully featured OS’s. I’m mostly using a browser, Konsole terminal and KDE Kate as my editor.

I found an unexpected hobby in writing POSIX scripts because it’s teaching me the inner workings of Linux. In the future I’d like to expand that to including the sed and awk commands but I haven’t really found a project to use them with yet.

Alpine Linux does offer a setup-desktop command/script which will easily setup a few desktop environments such as Gnome, Plasma, Xfce, Mate, Sway and Lxqt. That only sets up the basic desktop environment so a lot of other work is needed to set up things like sound, graphics and a few other things.

As I mentioned before, I still have Linux Mint DE installed. I mostly use it for Steam games but it has everything else I need for when I don’t feel like working out a problem because I wanted to simply open a .pdf file. However, it’s still really satisfying for me setting up a very specific work environment with the mininal tools I have available.

I think there is value in learning to work within a mininal environment to help give more life out of lower spec technology that’s currently available. Especially now with all the ram supply issues because of the AI rush.

I could imagine an it would matter more to people working with embedded devices.

Also some people just like learning or doing random things. Nothing wrong with some exploration, discovery or learning.

I don’t have any answers, just my own experiences. Last year I decided to use Alpine Linux as my Operating System for a couple of self-hosted things running on a Raspberry Pi. I chose it because it’s super minimal and used less common tools (for example doas instead of sudo). That unintentionally forced me to learn how to use Linux using more basic commands that are more likely to be available on other Linux systems.

Alpine Linux uses Busybox-Ash which is a POSIX compliant shell that’s very small and very basic. The scripts I ended up writing tend to be POSIX portable meaning that they should work on a wider variety of systems. That comes at the cost of script simplicity and readability as well as missing out on many features that make Bash scripts more complex, robust and easier to work with.

I have a working example POSIX portable script. I’ve been adding to it all the things I’ve learned. You can check it out here if you’re interested.

I use Alpine Linux with Sway as my daily driver but still keep a copy of Linux Mint DE ready to use because it’s nice to have a fully featured work environment for the days I don’t want to think.

All my personal data is on encrypted partitions and drives. The only data that would be left behind is whatever I was hosting on my Raspberry Pi’s. Anyone can do what they please with that data, it doesn’t matter to me. The encrypted stuff can be easily wiped and the hardware can be reused by whoever comes after me.