Description
After fielding another text message from someone about how to set up "this OLA thing you told me about", I thought I'd raise an issue here to gather some thoughts.
Running OLA on a Raspberry Pi seems quite common - there's a few issues here on the tracker here as well as some questions in the Google Group about getting it set up. Generally these days the answer is apt-get update && apt-get install ola, but (anecdotally) that isn't immediately apparent to a new user, especially one not used to using Linux. The prime source of misinformation seems to be this page on the website that also appears as the top result on Google.
The images linked from that page are ancient (0.9.5 is the latest release, and the latest unstable is from yikes March 2014). Further down the page are instructions for compiling from source on the Pi, a process that, last time I tried it on my Model 3B to troubleshoot an issue here, takes over an hour, and likely won't succeed anymore using those images owing to the massively outdated build environment.
I feel that improving this process would greatly help new users. At the very least, updating that page to replace references to the extraordinarily outdated downloads with apt-get instructions would be a marked improvement.
Aside from that, would a regularly updated (as in, part of the CI process that already exists) minimal Raspberry Pi image be something worth tackling? I would imagine an image with a read-only filesystem (to allow shutdown being a simple as unplugging the device) that launches OLA on startup, potentially using external media (i.e. a USB drive, not the base microSD card) for config files.
The UX improvements from this custom image would be:
- Reduce the setup instructions to something like Download image > flash to Pi following official Raspberry Pi instructions > power on and navigate to
<ip_address>:9090. - Guarantee a certain system setup that might reduce issues (i.e. no other software running)
- Add stability to headless installs by using a read-only root filesystem - I have personal experience with filesystem corruption owing to repeated improper shutdowns on headless OLA setups.
Thoughts?