So they just released the Raspberry Pi 4

finally a proper american translation! also:

franken-pi? :pie:

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Ordered an Argon AR1 Pi4 case + compatible fan… arrived yesterday… just hooked it up…

Gone from over 75’ C to :

╰─➤  sudo vcgencmd measure_temp
temp=37.0'C

I also noticed a few posts (e.g. @ Hackaday) about the foundation patching Raspbian to not generate so much heat… I’ll look into it…

Now I just need a 64 bit O/S - I’ve seen a few posts here and there where people are running Manjaro XFCE on their RPi4… Personally, I’d rather wait for an official Raspbian 64 bit…

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BREAKING NEWS!

You can now get an RPi 4B with EIGHT GB of RAM!

EIGHT!

$130 in Australia… I’m ordering one anyway… still not quite ready for desktop experience for me (I want a 64 bit Raspbian - and no I don’t want Manjaro or Ubuntu, I want Raspbian supported by Pi Foundation**)… Hmmm… I didn’t know ARM also had PAE - because 8 GB RAM is useless with a 32 bit O/S unless you’ve got a Physical Address Extension aware kernel…

** I had a bad experience with an unofficial build of Ubuntu 16 for RPi (on a 3B) - known bug after an update, it would be unbootable…
– update edit –
PAE on ARM is called LPAE (Large Physical Address Extension)… hmmm…

Note : next year Apple are rumoured to be released an ARM based MacBook (same ARM core[s] as in the current 2020 iPhones)… Doubt I’d buy one, but, all the same I’d still 10,000x rather any sort of Mac OS X device than be forced to use Microsloth Windows on a daily basis…

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@daniel.m.tripp

I love how you reacted exactly the same way I did… :laughing:

I exploded and sent this news to all my friends with all the excitement included!!

@daniel.m.tripp,
You may already know…
I haven’t tested it yet, but it’s possible to boot from USB

source: Andreas Spiess

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You have friends? Tell me what that’s like :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Seriously - I do have friends, but I reckon most of them would never have heard of a computer called a Raspberry, even if they watched Mr Robot and saw Elliot leave one hidden behind a wall panel in a secure data storage facility :smiley: - heck practically ALL my colleagues are Windows users and “System Admins” (I still reckon “click, click, clickety-click, double click, drag and drop, click, right click” ersatz system admin needs some other job title - it sure aint system admin, it’s more like “console gamer” - I’m serious you could train a monkey, or one of those dunking water bird things Homer used when he did “WFH”)…

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interestinger [sic] and interestinger [sic]:
elementary os on an 8 GB RPi 4 to me - would be “the killer app”…
elementary-os-unofficial/hera/arm64/raspi4 at main · meisenzahl/elementary-os-unofficial · GitHub

After some recent distro-hopping, for “light distros” - I just installed elementary os Junos “hera” 5.1 (x86_64 - they don’t do i386/686 anymore) on my underpowered (dual core Intel Atom) Samsung N150 Netbook (2 GB RAM 64 GB SSD) - and while not blazingly fast, it’s acceptable… I recently tested a few “low power” i386 distros on there, and Manjaro 20 XFCE (it went to power save during the install, and froze - so I gave up on it).

I still think elementary with pantheon is the best looking distro out there, but unfortunately it’s too locked down and “tamper proof” for me to use as a daily driver… I have previously used elementary (freya? or loki?) as a daily driver for about 9 months on an Asus ROG gaming laptop… hmmm…

running on Samsung N150 Netbook :

Edit : note above - that elementary os running on RPi 4 is 64bit - aarch64 kernel…

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And then just like that - there was 64 bit :

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=275370

Sure they’re still recommending 32 bit… but I think I’ll be trying this, or the elementary option above on both my RPi4 4 GB and my 8 GB when it arrives… (I’ll keep running 32 bit Raspbian Buster on my 2 x RPi3)…

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Indeed, found it yesterday:

I’d go for 64-bit, especially since 8GB and 4 quite fine cores won’t be standing in anyone’s way for compiling software manually, if necessary.
(I even have experience with compilation on Raspi Zero W …)

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I’ve compiled on single core ARM with 512 MB RAM (NextThing CHIP) before… I think it might have been Synergy? And also the CLI word processor Word Grinder…

Synergy took a couple of hours to compile, maybe even longer… probably let it run over night…
Wordgrinder, took about an hour…

First time I ever compiled on Linux was a single core 386DX-33 with 8 Megabytes of RAM :smiley: and that was the whole kernel :smiley: (1.2.13 kernel)… Took about an hour or two, depending how much I wanted in the kernel (e.g. soundblaster support? Creative Labs cd-rom interface support? more than one NIC?).

First time I ever “compiled” anything from source code was POVRay raytracer on a dual RISC Motorola 88010 CPU (at 40 Mhz each) and 64 or 128 MB RAM (running Data General UNIX on a DG AViiON)… I think that took like 10-15 minutes?

I recently compiled Sayonara 1.4.x from source on RPi3 and 4, I think it took an hour or two? I think I even timed it (i.e. I ran “time make blah blah blah” etc)…

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The problem with the Zero W was, that overly strenuous compilation made the device crash, in a way (no shutdown, but it became unusable), that made it impossible for me to monitor the compilation process. Once, just to test, I let it run for like a day and did not finish, whereas I know now that compilation takes only a couple of hours, not days. So it was some kind of overload for the Raspi 0 W.

The solution was using cpulimit. This made it possible to compile software on a 0W, without those pseudo-crashes.

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OK - I got the 64 bit arm64/aarch64 Raspbian Buster up and running just fine on my RPi4… hooked up to a 27" FHD monitor - and it’s then that I realise just how goddamn UGLY the “Pixel” desktop really is… it’s a travesty… an abortion… What were the foundation thinking? It’s just tolerable on a low dpi and low res smaller screen - but up this big? I’ve tweaked it and tried different themes, but there’s no escaping the fact, “Pixel” the “foundation’s” implementation of LXQT/LXDE looks like a dog’s breakfast…

So - previously I’ve gone to the trouble of tweaking RPi to use XFCE instead, but half a bunch of things don’t work, like the WiFi config tool in the “system tray”… this time? This time I “couldnae be arsed” (no I’m not Scottish, but I do occasionally read Scottish authors who “write in Scottish” like Ken McLeod and Irvine Welsh)…

I’ve given this elementary os “Hera” build for RPi two goes now - and it’s got a few niggles that annoy me (like blocking PAM logins on install of openssh-server, overwrite “typical” sudo behaviour, doesn’t have EITHER vi or vim installed - THAT IS A CRIME!) - but I can work with this… First time round I did a full update from its default repos - and it rebooted no dramas… big bubbles, NO TROUBLES!

I’m impressed! elementary on RPi 4 with 4 GB RAM - THRASHES elementary “hera” on an Intel Atom powered Netbook with 2 GB of RAM. And with 128 MB allocated to ARM GPU, I’ve still got over 3 GB “available” :

I’ve now got a spare SD card with elementary for aarch64 - gonna try that on my RPi 3B connected to a Motorola LapDock… I reckon a quad core ARM 64 with only 1 GB of RAM is going to outperform dual core Atom on 2 GB of RAM :smiley: … (note : tried it on the Pi 3B - on the LapDock - it worked, but obviously too great a power draw and it browned out - but it worked!).

I’m thinking - 2020, could it be year of the RISC based Linux Desktop? Wow it only seems like a quarter of a century ago, it was RISC based UNIX Desktop Workstation, and the great battle of Motif VS OSF :smiley:

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48-56 hours later? Still happy** with elementary os “Hera” 64 bit running on RPi4B with 4 GB RAM…

Also happy with Pi Foundation “unofficial” (i.e. “beta” or “alpha” I guess) 64 bit release of Raspbian…

I used my “spare” Pi3B to build/configure aarch64 Raspbian to run headless (easy - instead of remembering all that systemd stuff [like loginctl, systemctl disable --multi-user-target or whatevs] I just ran “sudo raspi-config” and toggled “Choose whether to boot into a desk…[blah blah]” to boot to CLI instead of that ghastly eyesore they call “Pixel”)…

Installed fail2ban, then fresh brand spanker install of PiHole FTL 5.0 (followed instructions here : https://blog.cryptoaustralia.org.au/instructions-for-setting-up-pi-hole/).

Shutdown my old 32 bit Raspbian doing PiHole and fail2ban, insert SD-Card of 64 bit Raspbian - boot up, tweak /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf (i.e. change IP address), restart pihole and now blocking ads with 64 bit RISC CPU / OS… I can ssh to my free No-IP DNS via the public intertubes and my router port forwards the non-standard-SSH port to my Pi’s SSH port…
— edit —
** one niggle / glitch - I think power saving is kicking in and unmounting my USB 3 flash drive (256 GB with the main subset of my music collection, sync’d using Resilio Sync)… and there’s no getting it back without rebooting… but it’s early days yet… anyway device never shows up again in fdisk or lsblk (never mind lsusb)… hmmm… on further analysis, doesn’t show up on my main desktop machine either (AMD), but it does show up on my Intel CPU laptop…

Long term goal is to get this to boot and run off something more performant and durable than SD Card…

A week later? RPi4B w/ 4GB RAM running elementary os “Hera” aarch64… Well there have been troubles, and a few fart bubbles…

It’s a bit laggy - e.g. drag the title bar “window handle” of a window rapidly across the screen - and it will eventually stop responding… and I’ll wait up to 10 mins for the screen to respond (this is over HDMI to a 27" AOC LCD display).

And perfomance of Chromium is a bit “lack-lustre” - much better response using elementary’s default browser “epiphany”…

Later on, plugged a USB 3 256 GB drive in to do Resilio Sync syncs of my music collection - it will eventually crash resilio and unmount/disable access to the USB drive… and resultingly barf out my resilio sync symlinks for “crucial” desktop folders like ~/Pictures, ~/Documents and ~/Music (had to reboot to make it play nice).

Tried the same thing with a USB 3 500 GB mechanical HDD - almost identical symptoms as with the USB flash drive… (unplugged HDD and replugged - and got it connected again without rebooting).

Note: in both cases (i.e. in all cases above) - I am using the “official” Raspberry Logo USB “C” power supply, and the RPi4 NEVER displays the brown out lightning bolt, so I don’t think it’s lack of power - something else… I suspect AARCH 64 kernel not quite ready for prime time…

Thinking about trying out a Sandisk 256 GB Ultra Extreme Micro SD - and not bothering with external storage…

Not sure it’s ready to be my daily driver, yet - BUT - IT’S NEARLY THERE!

Sixty Four bits of RISC-y goodness…

So - the 8 GB model is bought and paid for and on the way…

I’ve pre-ordered a NexDoc 2 14" “touch” (FHD) - it’s basically a “dumb” laptop, a portable screen and keyboard and mouse, it can do HDMI and displayport over USB C and supply power via its battery (not that different from the Motorola Lapdock - which I’m using right now with one of my Next Thing NTC CHIP boards and a HDMI “dip” (single core ARM7 and 512 MB RAM and 8 GB NAND storage)… I’ve got two Motorola Lapdocks, but these things don’t supply enough power for RPi3 (never mind RPi4) and don’t have USB C, heck - there’s barely enough juice to keep the NTC CHIP happy (I keep a LiPo battery on the CHIP’s built in connector to prevent brownouts).

I’m planning to use this thing for work (the RPi4 and NexDoc)… so I can avoid using Windows as much as possible (and when I do have to use Windows, via RDP and remmina). Only thing it might have trouble with is Citrix (I’ve seen / read stuff about people using RPi as Citrix Thin Client) and VPN clients… But I can always tether to my phone or a free wifi AP in a cafe etc, SSH to my home LAN, then run the CLI VPN client to connect to customers…