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Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server

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Re: Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server

#3
I'm really beginning to dislike all these "Set up the Raspberry Pi as a X" tutorials. I think they contribute to the idea that there's something weird and peculiar about the Pi, and give the impression that if you want a tutorial to do something on the Pi you need a "For the Pi" tutorial.

Couldn't we instead have a "Install Raspbian" (or whatever) tutorial and then try to push the idea that at the end of that you have basically a low-powered Debian machine and can follow any "Do X on Debian" tutorial? It seems that one of the wonderful benefits of Debian as a "universal OS" is that it doesn't matter whether it's on a Pi or a ten-year-old 386 laptop, it's another computer and almost everything is just an apt-get away.

Re: Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server

#4
post #3

I'm really beginning to dislike all these "Set up the Raspberry Pi as a X" tutorials. I think they contribute to the idea that there's something weird and peculiar about the Pi, and give the impression that if you want a tutorial to do something on the Pi you need a "For the Pi" tutorial. Couldn't we instead have a "Install Raspbian" (or whatever) tutorial and then try to push the idea that at the end of that you hav…

Hm. Now that the link's finally loaded I can see that this is exactly the same link I posted a similar comment on on Reddit a few days ago, to which the author didn't take kindly. Hopefully I've made my case slightly better this time! :)

Re: Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server

#5
post #3

I'm really beginning to dislike all these "Set up the Raspberry Pi as a X" tutorials. I think they contribute to the idea that there's something weird and peculiar about the Pi, and give the impression that if you want a tutorial to do something on the Pi you need a "For the Pi" tutorial. Couldn't we instead have a "Install Raspbian" (or whatever) tutorial and then try to push the idea that at the end of that you hav…

But it does matter if you're using a Pi or an old laptop. I mean, those two are just radically different, but even for fairly comparable platforms you often end up having to do adjust procedures, you can't just blindly follow a how-to.

For a newbie, those subtle adjustments are often the difference between wifi working and not working. An experienced user will figure it out, but it can take forever.

The RPi isn't the cheapest or the fastest or the smallest or the most featurific board in its niche. But it's got great value as a standard platform, which means if you've got a problem, chances are someone else had it before and maybe wrote up a solution.

Of course it all breaks down once you start using external hardware, which I found out when I tried to get my USB wifi stick running (unsuccessfully). But at least you can google "raspberry pi " and get advice specific to you.

Re: Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server

#6
post #5
post #3

I'm really beginning to dislike all these "Set up the Raspberry Pi as a X" tutorials. I think they contribute to the idea that there's something weird and peculiar about the Pi, and give the impression that if you want a tutorial to do something on the Pi you need a "For the Pi" tutorial. Couldn't we instead have a "Install Raspbian" (or whatever) tutorial and then try to push the idea that at the end of that you hav…

But it does matter if you're using a Pi or an old laptop. I mean, those two are just radically different, but even for fairly comparable platforms you often end up having to do adjust procedures, you can't just blindly follow a how-to. For a newbie, those subtle adjustments are often the difference between wifi working and not working. An experienced user will figure it out, but it can take forever. The RPi isn't the…

I'm not sure it matters more that you're using a Pi than it would matter which old laptop you're using.

And, when it's as low-level as simply making something work, rather than particularly optimising it (when the fact that it's a Pi or a 2003 T61 or a whatever do matter), I think that treating it as a slow Debian machine and finding a generic howto (or, better, a few generic howtos) is much more appropriate than insisting that you find a "How to install postfix and courier on as raspberry pi".

Obviously for troubleshooting problems the hardware's much more important, too, but so far I've just treated my Pi as just another Debian box and everything's just working.

Re: Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server

#7
post #2

Has anyone experimented with using it as a media server ?

Xbmc is reported to work tolerably well & you can pay a £1 or so to get mpeg2 hardware decoding in the GPU along with the mpeg4 that you get by default. (I know, I know: software should be free. Sometimes you get to deal the cards you've got & if you want mpeg2 decoding on the pi GPU, you have to pay for the key to unlock it to cover the licensing costs for the codec.)

I'll have to try it out myself.

Re: Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server

#10
post #8

You would be better off with Nginx rather than Apache with such limited hardware.

Exactly. Also GWan and Monkey[1] claim that their webserver perform faster while remain lightweight. Anyone interested to put RPi on actual datacenter can do so with EDIS for free[2]

[1]http://gwan.ch/benchmark http://monkey-project.com/benchmarks/raspberry_pi_monkey_ngi...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4636374

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