Yeah, the automatic install is effortless, but if you plan to do literally anything else other than wirelessly send prints through your pi to your printer, you will be forced to know how to SSH into your pi and edit things. But virtually no good resources exist that tell you step-by-step how to do this. Most of them start off by telling you to do many things a newbie has no clue how to do, with no hint as to how to do them. So you start searching for how to do those things and run into the exact same problem: Tons of resources that assume you already know how to do the thing, or don't lay things out step-by-step.
Many tell you to start by plugging a keyboard and monitor into your Pi. Imagine being a newbie and having no clue how to do the 50 things you're being told to do in order to do something simple like enable a webcam, and the instruction start off by telling you to unhook everything you just unhooked, take your peripherals from your desktop computer, and hook them up to the pi so you can edit a setting. With no hint that you can login remotely.
This has been my previous two days. Every little thing I try to get working tells me to go do 50 other things I don't know how to do and the single most common denominator that keeps showing up is accessing the Pi via SSH. Which is a step that the OctoPrint instructions explicitly allow you to skip and rely on an automatic approach. This leaves you lost, confused, and frustrated later when you try to do absolutely anything else and keep getting spammed with "login via SSH, login via SSH, login via SSH" all by sources that refuse to tell you how to actually do it without making it a 30+ minute obstacle.
Just start newbies off on the right foot and tell them, step-by-step, how to use SSH to setup their pi for OctoPrint.
Typically it's just for one-off specific things that this is recommended I think, and mostly with advanced setups or for troubleshooting problems. In most cases any of the files you need to edit (ie octopi.txt for webcam changes) can be edited prior to putting the SD card into the pi. In most cases the pi imager setup process is painless and not all users need to SSH to the pi (unless you didn't change the default password). It also takes less than a minute to search and find out how to SSH to a pi.
I think I have to agrees with @jbrsh on this one. I would not consider myself a noob to Linux, building servers or the use of ssh, but I can confirm it definitely does not take a minute to find out how to ssh into octopi. I’ve been searching for almost a week and have tried all sorts from editing files on the SD card to using a keyboard and monitor to manually run “rasp-config” and nothing seems to work. I’m constantly hitting the error where ssh is definitely listening but each time I try and log in it defaults to trying to use a key that is not configured and doesn’t give me the option to enter any credentials.
I’m sure it’s just a case of missing a simple step, but I’m struggling to find what that step is.
I desperately need assistance on this topic, I can't login to my company's 3d printer right now and we're under duress to print masking for some parts. If anyone knows how to actually SSH and is willing to lay it out step-by-step in layman's terms (EXTREME layman's terms, as I had never even heard of the term "SSH" until my login stopped working) then I would be very grateful.
