Windows is my daily driver. I'm pretty horrible at Linux, but can get around. So for web projects I typically spin up an Ubuntu instance on Virtual Box. For this project, I started from HackerHouseYT's awesome Smart Mirror project https://hackaday.io/project/13466-raspberry-pi-smart-mirror I cloned the git repository and got it running on Ubuntu pretty quickly. So now I needed to get it up on a Pi.

The Pi I've been using is sitting on the kitchen table hooked up to a keyboard, mouse and monitor. It's not a comfy place, I'd rather use my desk. Desk space is limited and didn't really have space for a third monitor, second keyboard...too lazy to disconnect...reconnect. Hey, can I run a Virtual Box of Raspian on my Windows machine?

Mostly, yes. I seem to recall an article about Debian+PIXEL for i386 systems....Just download the i386 version from here https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc-mac/

Cool, now I can code either in Ubuntu, deploy to the PIXEL i386 vm and make sure it works and figure out what additional dependencies I might need on PIXEL. Then once it's all working, I can sit down at the kitchen table and deploy to the real PI.

So far, the i386 PIXEL is 95% the same as the PIXEL running on the real Pi.