The Ncurses menu system may look a bit dated, but it can really help you to get things done – quickly.
Diet Pi, the low-resource Swiss army knife of distros, runs on anything, so it’s fitting that there D is a new alpha version for the Raspberry Pi 5.
After downloading the 170MB disk image – yeah, Diet Pi v9.1 is that small – we used Raspberry Pi Imager to write it to a microSD card. After the initial boot expanded the OS to use the card’s full capacity, we followed the Diet Pi setup screens. This can be done at the Pi, using a monitor, keyboard and so on. Or, we can follow the setup process over SSH – look for the Diet Pi machine on your network. The process involves configuring user accounts and choosing whether or not to disable a serial console.
After setup, we are dropped into an Ncurses menu where we can further configure the system, search for software or browse the software catalogue. This is where the key strength of Diet Pi comes into play. Rather than load every single piece of software into a bloated disk image, Diet Pi provides a simple means to install what we need. In a manner similar to tasksel (a command used in Debian core installations), we can scroll through a catalogue of apps and set them to install. If you need a web server (LAMP, LLEP and so on), select and install – all of the dependencies are taken care of. The sheer number of installable applications and tools available via the catalogue is overwhelming, but luckily Diet Pi has broken them down into sections. From desktop environments to media/home automation servers and gaming, it is all there and so, so easy to install.
For our test, we installed Node-RED, Mosquitto MQTT server and a web front-end for Diet Pi. We just selected all the apps from the catalogue, hit Confirm, and then selected Install. In a few minutes we had everything running and working as we expected. All of the services were enabled and started when the Raspberry Pi 5 was booted. We soon had a Node-RED flow running to send and receive messages on our own private MQTT server. Handy for those of us who like building Pi sensor networks but don’t want the world to see our data.