And very slow too, that is, if you managed to get the thing working.

So here’s another way to connect an Android device to Ubuntu, which, to much surprise, actually works (woohoo!). Instead of mtpfs, you’ll be using the amazing go-mtpfs library. Just run these commands to install go-mtpfs:

sudo apt-get install golang fuse git-core libmtp-dev libfuse-dev
sudo adduser $USER fuse
mkdir /tmp/go 
GOPATH=/tmp/go go get github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs
sudo mv /tmp/go/bin/go-mtpfs /usr/bin/
mkdir ~/MyAndroid

Now, go-mtpfs is installed. To mount your Android device, run these commands:

go-mtpfs ~/MyAndroid &

Voila! Your device’s contents can now be found at the MyAndroid folder in your home directory. If you belong to the “everything must be unmounted safely” tribe (like I do), then here’s your birthday present unmounting command:

fusermount -u ~/MyAndroid

That’s it! Not very simple, but it’s not like you’ll be able to find a more reliable method, can you?

I used the latest Raspbian image (Debian Wheezy/Testing), and installed lighttpd 1.4.31, php 5.4.4 and mysql 5.5.24 straight from the Debian repositories. Linking up lighttpd with the PHP interpreter using FastCGI was very simple:

sudo apt-get install php5-common php5-cgi php5 php5-mysql
sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php

Then, I followed the steps outlined in this answer on Server Fault to set up a named vhost in lighttpd. There were other methods on various websites regarding mod_simple_vhost but since I didn’t need a dynamic setup based on the name of each virtual host, a simpler setup like the example in the Server Fault answer worked for me.

After that, I followed the regular WordPress installation procedure. Who knew $35 could get you a decent web server?

Initially, I had concerns about the performance of the Pi and whether it would be able to take up the load of a full WordPress website with MySQL and all. While obviously you wouldn’t want to run a high-traffic website on low-performance hardware like this , it does the job for any very-low-traffic web site, and I’m quite surprised at how much performance it can deliver for the amount of power it consumes.

Who woulda thunk you could serve website pies?

So there you have it. I’ll be running this blog on the Pi for the next few weeks. Let’s see how it goes; it’s going to be a hell of an experiment. Or, probably a very good idea.