I have an Odroid N2+ (an alternative to Raspberry Pi) at home. It’s very dear to me. I don’t watch much TV and movies but when I do it’s through it and it runs a bunch of other software that I use.

Originally I was running Arch Linux ARM on it which booted from a microSD card. I went with Arch because it is a rolling release distro. Setting up the software and services and I needed was a bit of a painful process on Arch but that is just how Arch is. There isn’t much handholding. But this is a process that I don’t mind much because it is learning experience if I am in the right headspace to tackle it. Other pain point were that the mainline kernel wouldn’t work and USB wifi adapter didn’t work out of the box which is very tiring.

Last week I did a blooper where I snapped the microSD card in half. After ordering a new one I now had to set up the whole thing again. I am too tired and anxious these days so I wasn’t looking forward to it. I thought of installing Void Linux since it is an OS I can wrap my head around but the issues with the mainline kernel would cause friction. Then I read about DietPi and decided to give it a go. Best decision ever:

• It has images specially for Odroid N2+ (don’t need to compile a custom kernel)
• USB WiFi adapter worked out of the box
• Has a dialog based configuration assisstant that appears on first boot. It let me configure configure the wifi and disable ethernet. This handles things like configuring the systemd services that check if the interface is up. This had caused a lot of pain for me on Arch.
• dietpi-drive_manager let me easily configure automounting the external HDD
• dietpi-software allows installing common self-hosted software easily. I was able to install and start jellyfin through it just like that. Now I can watch my favourite slop again.

All this only took a couple of hours. I will like set up jellyfin through docker/podman later when I have the time but I love that the option was available to me to set it up so quickly.

Thank you, DietPi.