Thank you for your replies.
Some discovery going on here. First I found I needed to change hostnames. Confusing…
Correctly change the hostnames
So now with a #1 and #2…
#1 had caja-share installed, #2 didn’t. ? Neither had Seahorse, and neither had the avahi-service started.
#1
Starting the avahi-daemon revealed my server. Yesss!
which I can log into, though I have to enter credentials twice - once for root, another for shares.
I have put “systemctl start avahi-daemon.service” into startup applications with a 10s delay, which results in a password prompt at startup. It’s cludgey and I hope there’s a better way.
Not much experience writing scripts… Is that the right direction to look?
Passwords are still not remembered (no suprise), and think this has everything to do with leaving a keyring password blank soas not to be bothered with it. Works on the other machine… but that was years ago I set it up… Mint 18 or something… and Mint not Manjaro
Solid steps in the right direction, though. Thank you kindly. Will look at seahorse a bit later.
Pi #2 is a shambles. Not pingable yet has internet access. Caja-share wasn’t installed.
Lots of issues, so just going to junk it and start again rather than root through the weeds.
Want to clone #1 as an .ISO to save on headaches.
Is dd the best tool for this?