
Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server - celticbadboy
http://lifehacker.com/raspberry-pi/
======
BigRedS
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.

~~~
morsch
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 <manufacturer> <model>" and get advice
specific to you.

~~~
BigRedS
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.

~~~
morsch
You didn't really add any arguments -- why doesn't it matter, why is it not
imortant? I think specific how-tos are useful, regardless of whether it's
about making things work or making them fast, because there are often
countless things that could conceivably go wrong, and a specific how-to can be
as succinct as possible for a given set of circumstances.

If I just want to mess around with a platform, I might not care about that,
and I might prefer to read a dozen more abstract how-tos and guides to get in-
depth knowledge about a topic. But usually, I don't want to be troubleshooting
(or optimising) Wifi USB hardware, and it absolutely does matter whether
you're using a RPi or an old laptop, in fact it matters whether you're using a
Rev. A or a Rev B RPi. A generic guide to installing node.js on the RPi would
have been much less straightforward than the specific one I had available.

And the difference is way more pronounced when you're trying to get intrepid
newbies interested in your platform.

~~~
jerf
The newbies are the reason. They need to know what the word is they need to
search for, or they may not realize the full power they have for them, which
is putatively the point of the RPis.

Personally I am also perturbed in that it contributes to the growing culture
of seeing devices as something other than general-purpose computing machines,
and I really fear the political implications of a growing misconception about
the nature of these _computers_. What bothers me even more than these RPi
tutorials are "Pedestrian Computer Application X Run On A Mobile Phone!
Wowzers!" stories, some of which even make it onto HN (though not so much
lately). Yes, you got your general purpose computer to run a program. This
shouldn't be surprising, this should be the _expected_ outcome, the news
should be that you find yourself unable to run whatever program you like on
these general-purpose computing devices.

RPis are computers. Cell phones are computers. The cheapest, crappiest feature
phone currently being sold has specs that blow every computer I owned before
1990 out of the water. This is important for as many people as possible to
understand, lest we blunder into walled gardens for no good reason.

------
andyking
This isn't even a link to an article. It's a link to a category on Lifehacker,
which then links through to an article, which then links through to _another_
article at: [http://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/how-to-
ra...](http://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/how-to-raspberry-pi-
web-server/)

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

~~~
lousy_sysadmin
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...](http://monkey-
project.com/benchmarks/raspberry_pi_monkey_nginx)

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

------
skizm
I live in the US. Is there any way to get my hands on one (or more) of these
in a reasonable amount of time. The site seems to indicate that after you
place your order you will have to wait months before you actually get it :(

~~~
freehunter
I finally got mine in the mail yesterday. I ordered it 9 months ago from RS
Electronics. I've heard from other hackers here that they ordered theirs from
other companies and had much faster turnaround time.

By the time I got mine, my interest had significantly waned.

------
skimmas
What I think would be nice was to setup RPi as a open Wireless network with a
captive portal that you could carry with you.

------
sami36
Has anyone experimented with using it as a media server ?

~~~
pja
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.

