Reviving my raspberry pi

Why did I waste my time trying to connect eduroam?

I decided to dust off my Raspberry Pi after about five years, thinking it would be good practice to use the terminal again and have another operating system without messing with my laptop. Since I had a new SD card, I figured I might as well install a fresh OS rather than dealing with whatever was left on the old one.

First mistake: I installed a version without a desktop environment and then tried to connect the Raspberry Pi to Eduroam. The authentication process was a nightmare. To make things easier, I installed a lightweight desktop version, since I read that the Raspberry Pi 3 has limited resources. Then it finally hit me—I could just use another network, like my mobile hotspot. That was so much easier.

Still, I kept trying to connect to Eduroam. Another day wasted. At some point, I got so confused that I even managed to delete the WLAN option entirely and couldn’t figure out how to get it back. That’s when I decided my best option was to install the full desktop version of Ubuntu.

Now, I still can’t connect to Eduroam, and I still don’t fully understand why authentication is so difficult. On top of that, this version of Ubuntu is painfully slow, which means I haven’t even attempted to install ROS2 yet—one of my main goals in the first place.

Currently, I’m looking into adding swap space to help with memory constraints. On the bright side, I realized I don’t have to burn through my mobile data anymore—I can just use the QM-Visitor network.

I’m almost certain I shouldn’t be spending this much time on this, but now that I’ve started, I feel like I need to get it properly set up. At the very least, I want it ready so I can install ROS2 whenever I decide to pick it up again.

Next post: From Laggy to Usable