My Raspberry Pi 4B Setup

Introduction

Everyone who works with computers should have a raspberry pi for multiple reasons. One of which is most important to myself is the fact they are ARM64 based cpu architecture. Not to mention these days they come out with 8GB of ram, which quite honestly is more than enough. I'm not trying to market for raspberry pi here, I genuinely love the fact I can buy a cheap computer with zero pre-installed firmware. Ok scratch that apprently it does have some form of proprietory firmware in the integrated gpu within the processor, but from what I hear its very tame and nothing like the intel management engine.

Of course, having a lot of ram, a strong GPU, and strong CPU are all really nice conveniences. However this has allowed a lot of software developers in todays world to rely on such conveniences... This has brought about a great shame. It doesn't have to be a Pi, owning a "limited" computer by todays standards, working with it, will make you a better computer operator.

Basic Setup

Hardware

In regards to hardware, Its mostly all just what you would find in the basic Canna kit for a raspberry Pi4B model. The "Upgrades", I've done in this area would be a better aluminum cooling case, and an external SSD drive using one of the 3.0 USB ports.

I do have a UPS (Uninterupted Power Supply) integrated, however there is a lot that can be done via the software to make this a much nicer setup, and hence will be briefly mentioned here.

Firmware

As a quick recap in case you don't know, firmware is essentially what sits between your motherboard (hardware), and your operating system (software). Which makes itself the first software that will be ran after you turn on your machine via the power button. For the Pi, at this point of the process, I just have a simple Debian Distribution of sorts that was found via the official raspberry pi repo. Maybe I could "efficient max" here and put in a gentoo version, or even just de-bloat maybe what I think is bloat. But at a certain point, I'm just happy to have something non-proprietory as my firmware which sadly is very un-common today.

OS

So this is the part where it starts to become fun, I must emphasize my configuration isn't the gentoo-on-rpi-64bit by Sakaki, nor the community forked version.
Initially these options were interesting to me, however their last updates were years ago and some of the configurations arn't as I'd like them myself. In such situations, its typically easier to just set this up yourself, and there is good enough documentation on the gentoo wiki for this.

So if it isn't obvioius, the OS I've chosen for this machine is Gentoo. Paired with the earlier mentioned SSD and cooling case, the fact I compile everything from source is not a problem at all. I've migrated all the read write process onto the SSD, with the SD handling the initial boot up process which drastically reduces the wear and tear on the SD. At the moment of writing this, I have not written my reason for using Gentoo and loving Gentoo. If you've read up until this point, and have a basic understanding of Gentoo, not much needs to be said at this point in time.

Systems

So finally the part that starts to make this setup be useful. Whats nice about gentoo is that I only have what I use. This means that for example, because I don't need a desktop environment I simply do not have one installed. I do however have Tmux, and Nvim installed. You could argue that this is unncessary because TTY is around, and nano exist, although I think I may have had to install nano funnily enough. Regardless, these are my conveniences and sometimes its nice to have nice things okay, jeez. Nvim in particular is nice because thats my current editor I've been using and learning. Eventually I'd love to learn ARM64 here, and Neo-Vim will make that a very enjoyable experience.

I have a NAS (Network-Attached-Storage) via the samba software which uses the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol. This is quite honestly very convenient, as I hold my music database here which I can then access on other machines connected to my network and play them via MPD. However here is a more real world scenario I've had happen every day I have a java class. I would be working on my main PC, and simply needing to transfer my Java homework, I just drag and drop the folder from one computer, the pi, and then finally on my laptop I drag and drop onto my local storage somewhere, ALL THROUGH A UI FILESYSTEM INTERFACE. So yeah super convenient, and it all takes me like I don't know twenty seconds or so. Genuinely a really nice convenience.

I mentioned it earlier, but I have a UPS system setup, the software that enhances the dumb battery and makes it smart is the very funnily named NUT system. The guide on the official gentoo wiki is honestly perfect and that's what I used. This is really nice to have because say power goes out, my Pi might be compiling something important or there may be un-saved buffers. Really not the best thing to have happen to memory. With NUT, I'm able to configure it to safely self shut-down itself if it detects power has been out for say five minuets.

Quite honestly, there is a lot more I could do here, and it wouldn't be so difficult to setup... However I'm in school, and can only afford to setup one of these systems a weekend or so. Rome wasn't built in one day. At the moment when I need to update my Pi I do this manually, however there is a Daemon (system) that I plan to configure known as Cron. This essentially is an automatic-updater, where I can also have it email me once it does its job of all changes/complaints on what's going on. Paired with the fact this is all in Gentoo, I could litterally have the long compile process going on say when I'm away from the computer. If anything goes wrong, well NUT is there to save the day with a safe shutdown procedure in case power goes out. The point is, that having a setup like this, you can come up with lots of daily conveniences that just makes your daily work flow more pleasant.