Raspberry Pi Writerdeck with DietPi

That's right, you're interested in setting up your own minimalist distraction-free bullshit-free desktop-free Raspberry Pi writer deck. Right? OK. Let's do it. This whole process is about simplicity, and so I've aimed to make this as simple as possible, but still complete, even here in the instructions. If there's anything I left out, let me know. But you should have everything you need here to set up a minimalist text-BASED Emacs writing environment on a cheap-ass mini-computer.

What are you waiting for?

Raspberry Pi OS Lite would also work for this, but DietPi is leaner at about ~200MB base and ships with a TUI installer (dietpi-software) for picking out software you'll want and some nice config menus for doing your network configuration and stuff like that. No desktop is installed by default—which is great because we don't need or want one—you'd have to explicitly add one if you want it.

Just get yourself a copy of the DietPi OS ISO and flash it to your SD card. I use the Raspberry Pi Imager program because it's easy and DietPi is already available as an option. It couldn't be easier than that. And you don't have to risk your drive safety with a poorly formatted dd command.

Now, once you've got a nicely formatted SD card just pop it into your Pi and power that bitch up. That's it! The rest is just configuration.

If you want to be REAL minimalist and distraction-free, you can skip over this section and not do Internet. I think that's pretty crazy and maybe impossible because if you want to do what I'm doing you'll need Internet at least for installing some packages (like Emacs). DietPi doesn't have vim (as if you'd want to use that anyway). But it does have nano.

I'd advise opting for Internet. You'll also need networking for sending your git repos around (which I use to sync files with my production desktop). Yo, let's do this.

Run dietpi-config → Network Options → WiFi.

1. Set Country to US (or wherever you at, it's actually important to get this right)
2. Scan → pick your WiFi network → enter your password.
3. Toggle Auto Reconnect to [On] so it reconnects after reboot/outage.
4. Apply.

Verify with:

ip addr show wlan0

Note your self-assigned IP for SSH later.

DietPi comes with its text-based software shop where you can browse vairous packages install what you like.

Run dietpi-software, browse to Development and Programming, install:

• Git
• Build-Essential (compilers and headers)

This is the basics, you'll need at least those going. I actually couldn't find build-essential last time I ran the dietpi-software program but maybe that was just me that day, and it was easy to just install it with apt. So if you just want to use apt that's fine! I just wanted to make sure you had both options.

I've included some other software I like in order of importance:

sudo apt install emacs-nox git
sudp apt install tmux pandoc aspell aspell-en 
sudo apt install python3-pip python3-venv pipx
sudo apt install fonts-terminus console-setup

Pick and choose what you like. It is your pleasure and privilege to do so.

This is a big one. Because we're not installing an X window server or anything like that, and we're staying all text-BASED, you will actually change your type and font settings at the kernel level. I know that sounds more intimidating than it is, so let's just see how easy it is.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

Choices that worked well for me:

• Encoding: UTF-8
• Character set: Guess optimal for you
• Font: Terminus
• Size: 16x32 (large, very readable for prose)

Apply immediately without reboot:

sudo setupcon

You'll notice when you're back at the prompt, your font is noticeably more readable. But we're not done with the typography yet. We want our writerdeck to simulate an old school word processor like WordStar, so we need to change some colors.

Now we're getting into the fun stuff… a e s t h e t i c s of retro computering.

Linux console supports palette remapping via escape codes. So all you got to do is add this jazz to your ~/.bashrc:

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
    echo -en "\e]P0000000"  # background: black
    echo -en "\e]P7ff6600"  # foreground: warm amber
    echo -en "\e]P8555555"  # bright black
    echo -en "\e]PFffb000"  # bright white: amber
    clear
fi

Apply:

source ~/.bashrc

I just want to congratulate on your on setting up your nice Raspberry Pi writerdeck. Your system is fully functional now, and you don't need to go any further if you don't want to. But you may notice there's some stuff you might want.

• SSH service, a nice way to connect to your Pi and transfer files, and stuff like.
• Git repository configuration, for version control and also a way of moving files around.

If you want to get some of this awesome stuff going, you will find more information below. SO MUCH INFORMATION!

You'll need a way to connect remotely to your Pi writing station. SSH is great for this. DietPi ships with something called Dropbear on port 22 (the standard SSH port), which is going to block OpenSSH.

Either use Dropbear for connection or shut it down and use OpenSSH. I opted to shutdown Dropbear and use OpenSSH, just because I'm more familiar with it.

sudo apt install openssh

sudo systemctl stop dropbear
sudo systemctl disable dropbear
sudo systemctl enable --now ssh

Verify it's listening:

sudo ss -tlnp | grep :22

From other computer, to test reachability:

nc -zv <self-assigned-ip> 22

Then connect:

ssh dietpi@<self-assigned-ip>

Now, you can move files around in any way you like, but I'm already using git extensively in my writing process, so it's a natural choice not only for version control but also for redundancy and file transfer, etc.

For this setup, I'll presume you have the Pi (obviously) and, let's say a laptop also running a Linux or Unix-like OS of some kind.

Basic workflow: set up bare git repo (basically a git install with no files in it just a repo) on the Pi (separate from your working directory), and you have working directories on both the Pi and laptop, both workstations push/pull to the bare repo.