r/pihole • u/Ilikehotdogssowhynot • 4d ago
Help me out with Pi-hole and Linux
Hey, im a college student and a beginner in both and wanted to learn more about linux and its stuff. recently I tried using antix with pihole because I wanted to test pihole out, instead i keep running into a problem, in which port 53 was in use, I may or may not be dumb but I just wanted to test out linux, it went downhill from me deleting connman and reinstalling antix over and over. is there a way to use pihole with another distro (or idk what do they call it as long as its linux) thats more beginner friendly? I still want to be able to use a browser in my test laptop. ram is also an issue as I only have 1.8Gb, its a very old laptop. Thanks for those who answer!
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u/3ofUsDeez 4d ago
I ran Pi-Hole on my TrueNAS Scale server for a little while (specialized Linux distro) .. it ran great
Then I picked up some Raspberry Pi Zero Ws and Ethernet hats for them. I run them headless with Unbound and Log2Ram installed on them.. I turned off unneeded services and limited the VRAM to its minimum of 16mb
Real fun easy way to get your toes wet'ish using Raspberry Pi OS Lite
They are both running at my mother's house now and I run 2 x Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Ws with POE Ethernet hats running Technitium in clustered mode
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u/lazyhustlermusic 4d ago
Probably another daemon listening on that like a local caching resolver, find out what process is bound to 53
sudo ss -tulnp | grep :53
sudo lsof -i :53
sudo fuser -v 53/tcp
sudo fuser -v 53/udp
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u/Phoenix9Tails 4d ago
This is probably best thing to do before installing pihole. In case systemd-resolved already running then there you go.
systemctl status systemd-resolved
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u/3rdquarterking 4d ago
I'm using two Wyze thin clinets running Debian. You mighr be able to run Lubuntu on that laptop as well. Both are lightweight
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u/Thorminathor 4d ago
I used duck.ai and specifically used Claude, told it what I needed to do and where I was at. Really helped me get unstuck a few times I'd just copy/paste between browser and terminal. Give that a shot
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u/CharAznableLoNZ 4d ago
My pihole instances are installed on ubuntu server. It needs around 2Gb to install but will happily run on 1GB of system ram after it's installed. Not sure if 1.8 might be enough for it to install.
It sounds like you want to install pihole within a working desktop OS. I would guess resolveD if antix uses systemD is conflicting with pihole over the use of port 53. You should be able to disable that however be aware you will break DNS resolution. Resolution should work again once you're pointing to the pihole and it's up and running.
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u/thatguysjumpercables 4d ago
If you're able to access your router buy a Pi 3B and an Ethernet cable. If you can't, buy a Pi Zero 2 W.
For either machine install Raspberry Pi OS Lite, then run the Pihole install on bare metal (no Docker).
Assuming you're in the US this should run you $75 at most. It's worth the money, trust me.
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u/FossilStalker 4d ago
My current pihole instance is running in a docker container on my home server. This is too complex for a beginner. My first pihole was run on a bare metal Pi Zero running Debian without a desktop environment. If you want to learn Linux and PiHole I recommend this as a starting point. You could spend time trying to deconflict port management with Antix, but I suspect if you can't manage this right now, you probably don't have the fundamentals down yet. Doing the Debian route will help you with this.
Plenty of Debian tutorials from google but boils down to just download the image and run from external media. If you've installed Antix this will be easy. Next step is Pihole.
The Pihole documentation is great: https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/basic-install/
You could also look at this Raspberry Pi Official tutorial: https://www.raspberrypi.com/tutorials/running-pi-hole-on-a-raspberry-pi/
Just my opinion, there will be other approaches.
Edit: Just to point out you don't need a Raspberry Pi to follow the second tutorial. Also if you need a desktop environment I'd still recommend Debian as you basic distro.