Pi4
I got a Raspberry Pi 4 recently to play around with on some home projects. I am going to try to see if its functional as a developer machine as well as run some dockerized apps on it. This post will document my experience and steps to get stuff up and running. Most of the documentation I do is essentially bread crumbs that I can later use to recreate something if I decide to blow it away and start over.
Choosing an OS
My first choice is to pick an OS. There aren't many available yet for PI4 so I'm starting with the officially supported Raspbian Buster Lite distro. I'm also going to try to install the Mate Desktop GUI on top of Raspbian. This guide talks about the steps you need to take to make it all work together.
First Try
I got the PI4 connected, booted up, and all was going well...then I changed my password. Little did I know that changing the keyboard to US would end up bricking my OS. Because I used special characters in my password I got stuck on the terminal login with no way to get past it...time to reload the OS...fail #1
Manjaro
I tried out manjaro and it was very nice on the PI. I was able to install some software, overclock the cpu and gpu, and try some stuff out. One quirk I found that led me to keep looking was the display resolution. For whatever reason it changed the monitor settings so that there was a border around the entire screen. I couldn't figure out how to get it to change back so I kept looking for other options.
Ubuntu
Ultimately I'm going to try and set up a Ubuntu Server on the PI and use it to run some apps on my network, along with providing a local network share. Going to document the setup steps below.
Installation
Hop on over to Ubuntu's Site to download the latest ISO for Raspberry PI4. Flash the microSD card using Balena Etcher. Once finished pop it into the PI4 and run through the installation, change passwords, etc. Finally install open-ssh.
sudo apt install openssh-server
Wireless
First install wireless network-manager to use nmcli
sudo apt install network-manager