Ubuntu 19.10.1 for Pi3 & Pi4, 32 & 64 bit

Just wanted to pass this along for the hobbyists.

formatting link

Reply to
TCW
Loading thread data ...

It is reasonable to consider an RPi4 to be quite capable of being a desktop even w/ an OS which is relatively 'inefficient' (bloated?) compared to the choices for earlier RPi/s such as 3B.

I think Ubuntu should be congratulated for accepting a role in supporting ARM such as RPi4.

However, there is a much bigger picture that involves support for ARM devices of much less resources - that would not apply to Ub.

Lighter weight distro/s such as Raspian and others should continue to get the most attention from ARM devices.

--
Mike Easter
Reply to
Mike Easter

It's not the distro that is lightweight: it is simply the lack of CPU sucking javascript in a web browser.

Or X-windows.

Ditch a GUI and you can run on a z80.

--
Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early  
twenty-first century?s developed world went into hysterical panic over a  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Well, I would say that some distro/s and DEs and browsers focus more on being modest in their resource consumption than others.

Ubuntu is 'based on' Debian, but it has its own repo/s; and Ub 'generally' uses more resources than Debian.

Historically, KDE has been considered a heavier DE, but recent versions have shown KDE to be /much/ more modest in resource use than Gnome, which doesn't seem to care a fig about how efficient it isn't. A typical Gnome distro might use nearly twice as much resources live to the desktop than a typical KDE.

When someone assembles a distro such as Raspbian, they make choices in which base, Debian, which DE/WM LXDE/OpenBox and which mail/news agent Claws; whereas other distro dev/s make much heavier choices. The choice of Chromium for the default Raspbian browser was a choice leaning toward functionality rather than low resources.

Well, personally I'm more of a GUI person. My computing days started w/ an Atari TOS GUI, so I didn't 'grow up' using a command line. Nowadays I DO use command lines when they do the job I want done more efficiently.

The Raspbian choices for my RPi3B do just fine, resource-wise. If I were a 4G RPi4, the resource management would be different; but I would likely use an XFCE Debian. I'm not sure about the Claws vs Thunderbird issue; tho' Tb is VERY bloated, it has some features for news I like that Claws doesn't.

--
Mike Easter
Reply to
Mike Easter

I start off with rasbian-lite then build up exactly what I want for the particular application - usually involves openbox and rox-filer

--
W J G
Reply to
Folderol

Is Raspbian really "light" though? It's a lot lighter than conventional desktop Linux, but still kinda heavyweight. I had an used a functional GUI Unix in the 1990s that installed to some 60 megabytes of disk, and worked with my 4 megabytes of RAM.

These days, you can use Alpine as a super-lightweight Linux, but I think the GUI install is still more than 60 megs. A good chunk of Alpine's efficiency comes from ditching the bloated glibc in favor of a smaller alternative (musl libc) and ditching common bloated Gnu commands in favor of smaller things like busybox. If you expect bash everywhere, you'll be sad. But if you just expect a Posix shell, you'll be fine.

Maybe. I don't know how well a single 8-bit CPU will cope with all the problems I want to do (including Unicode text processing). But optimal usage of a z80 could certainly get close for a lot of my day-to-day stuff. Or, you could have a multiprocessor z80 system.

In comp.misc recently there was a post about a homebuilt laptop based on a 17 z80 CPU design. One CPU to manage keyboard and screen, one to run a server, and the others to run user processes. The screen is configured to be a 160x50 character display, which can be multiplexed to show up to four 80x25 windows at once, each window associated one of those other processors.

formatting link

It definitely pushes the limits of z80 design, but it's not as far as that could go as the designer notes in his blog post.

Elijah

------ text windows are more GUIish than mere Altair 8800 status LEDs

Reply to
Eli the Bearded

In the 90s, I preferred the GUI of a modified Win98se, litePC dev

98lite, which came in variants, sleek, chubby, overweight, and micro, which could do fine in as little ram as W95. But that was more like 32 megs of ram.

Linux on 32 megs of ram wasn't my 'style' :-)

For 1 meg of ram, in the latter 80s I ran my Motorola 68000 cpu GUI Atari ST TOS 1.0 w/ no hdd, OS in eprom, only a floppy for anything one needed to save. I did all of my online activities running in a cache/ text capture of Flash the telecom program which ran handy scripts.

Today I see Raspbian up in 85, but current Ub (Gnome) needs 672 and Neon KDE 381; so that is 1.76x KDE req by Gnome, not 2x.

--
Mike Easter
Reply to
Mike Easter

My raspian lite ... on a pi zero

top - 04:35:44 up 40 days, 19:21, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.10, 0.09 Tasks: 93 total, 1 running, 61 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie %Cpu(s): 0.3 us, 2.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 97.7 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si,

0.0 st KiB Mem : 443100 total, 41788 free, 36232 used, 365080 buff/cache KiB Swap: 102396 total, 102396 free, 0 used. 324200 avail Mem

$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/root 15G 1.7G 13G 13% / devtmpfs 213M 0 213M 0% /dev tmpfs 217M 0 217M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 217M 22M 195M 11% /run tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 217M 0 217M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 1.0M 8.0K 1016K 1% /var/MiPiFi /dev/mmcblk0p1 44M 23M 21M 52% /boot

MOST of that I could throw away and it would still run. But why bother?

Hmmm

--
     ?I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the  
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

On a sunny day (Wed, 11 Dec 2019 09:53:06 -0800) it happened Mike Easter wrote in :

On EVERY computa I have, I run Linux and immediately replaced whatever desktop it has by fvwm and xfm from the late last century. This gives me 9 virtual desktops, one has the web browser, one xfm (file manager with those icons ye know) and the other ones all have a rxvt terminal full screen; foreground white, text black the reason for fg white is that with ever varying text the average brightness does not change so much and is much more pleasant to the eyes. The middle xterm is black background and runs alsamixer. But then I do a lot of programming, much of the stuff running here I wrote myself. KDE is out, is bloatware, and that gnome thing I stay clear off. Most of the GUI programs I write use libforms, the rest writes directly to X. So same user interface since 1998 or so for all computas I have. As to libforms, the latest version on debian has been screwed up by the maintainer so I compile a very old (original) version from source.

Where I see debian go, and many good programs with it, is getting worse and worse. I once had an old Ubuntu on this laptop I use now, maybe I should try the latest because Ubuntu has much better support for some special hardware, am radio ham too, would be nice if some stuff worked out of the box and not have to spend days porting things..

Speed? I do not have a problem with speed for the GUI code I write using libforms. It seems, and this is really funny, as we are getting to ever higher screen resolutions, speed suffers. There is normally NO NEED for those insane screen resolutions (4 k comes to mind) I am also using a very old PC, using it every day, that runs Xfree86 (from before that new crap) has the X mode-lines, for some old programs I use written for 640x480 or whatever it was, I just use the ctlr alt backspace switch to switch screen resolution on the fly so those apps that now become invisible on those screens with insane high resolution all of the sudden go fullscreen and can be read even by normal people of my age, :-) :-) Where it goes,?? Many times I have though about leaving Linux as it has alienated itself from Unix so much. Unix was written for efficiency when resources were expensive,,, thought free BSD but no experience with that, write my own multitasker (did that for Z80 once), or as China is now introducing their own OS as reply to precedent duck's tariffs, maybe the Chinese OS Those guys are clever, but my Chinese sucks, So.. anyways we need a change but that conspiracy between MS and hardware sellers is the capitalist system self destructive? OK 'nuf said'.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Wed, 11 Dec 2019 14:58:04 -0800) it happened Mike Easter wrote in :

Here teh Z80 OS I wrote, CP/M clone, it ran the Softwaretoolworks C compiler too::

formatting link

And I designed and build the hardware:

formatting link

I was faster then than the IBM PC cause I used a special RAMDISK.. Graphics card:

formatting link
had a lightpen too ;-) Sound, of course I had sound:
formatting link
Ramdisk:
formatting link
It would load a floppy into ramdisk and do everything from there... no seek rrr rrr rrrr instant computing.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Same here, but my bigger systems (old dual-Athlon house server and a couple of Lenovo laptops) all run Fedora with the XFCE desktop.

I've been running Fedora ever since it replaced Redhat Linux 7.x with no real issues. I switched to XFCE when Poettering's crew released Gnome2, a buggy, unfinished mess.

XFCE is worth a look: reasonably lightweight, no fancy fripperies and by an large it just gets on with the job.

Being naturally lazy, my RPi (an early 512KB B) has always run Raspbian in headless mode, though I periodically wonder if its worth switching it to Fedora - IMO dnf beats the pants off apt and that, apart from closer compatibility is a good enough reason for making the switch.

XFCE has 4 virtual desktops by default - a very useful feature, especially because moving applications between desktops is just a drag 'n drop operation on the main (top) menu bar.

--
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Well as you seem to have failed to stop the world in 1990 so you could get off, perhaps you should consider RISC OS.

Back in the 90s it was incredibly advanced for its time, but has spectacularly failed to adopt the ways of modern bloat, so it will still run with 90s levels of resources. You wont exhaust the the 512MB of a Pi, and as it's resolutely single core, an old original Pi B or Zero is sufficient, but it will also run even faster 2B and 3B.

---druck

Reply to
druck

On a sunny day (Thu, 12 Dec 2019 20:43:30 +0000) it happened druck wrote in :

Yes, well, I worked with Unix long before Linux appeared.. and one of my jobs involved designing ISA cards for the IBM PC., when the IBM clones came and everybody was getting one, times changed, I remember us having discussions about changing to Unix (from the MS DOS that then ruled) already back then. At home I was using my Z80 system, and also had networking (Viditel) I think the French name was Minitel, 1200 / 75 Bd IIRC modem... and downloaded Z80 programs 'online' from the CP/M user club with that long before internet existed. It was not until the DX2 486 appeared that I bought a PC for at home... and connected to the internet with trumpet winsock and Win 3.1 runing on DRDOS... In 1998 I found a CD with SLS Linux and tried it, my old Unix book helped a lot, and never went back to MS stuff (well laptop came with some version of win, replaced it by Ubuntu that worked out of the box..) Bought win XP once on recommendation of somebody, waste of money, silly stickers on your PC... removed it after a few days... iirc I tried risc OS on an old raspi, could not make sense of it, Releasing a 'Panteltje Linux' has occurred to me, but is a lifetime job, I run Slackware on this laptop and since that is a one man show mostly it is internally consistent and has worked for me on many putahs. I do see software THE OPERATING SYSTEM as an interface between user programs and hardware, NOT as the integrated untransparent buggy blob that MS sells ..

For that reason I do not normally upgrade or change OS / Linux, only when I buy new hardware, or in rare cases a new kernel module needs compiling.

So with Buster on my Pi 4 forget about me doing upgrades, and what needs to be added as applications will have to be from source mostly, So I see the OS as part of the hardware basically.

It is in the details as always; old PC next to me has a DVB-S PCI card, 2 sound cards, now 15 years old runs old Linux version, also with xfm 9 virtual desktops and zsh as shell.

The plus with the Pis is that you can put in a SDcard with a new OS and user application just like that, and have a totally different system. Playing on PCs with hardware partitions is more complicated (10 partitions with 4 different versions of Linux is normal for me) this laptop: panteltje20: ~ # df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/root 91788296 82022404 9765892 90% / tmpfs 3009536 0 3009536 0% /dev/shm /dev/sda9 104854396 104854396 0 100% /mnt/sda9 /dev/sda8 104854396 104206332 648064 100% /mnt/sda8 /dev/sda7 104854396 104524740 329656 100% /mnt/sda7 /dev/sda5 104854396 103362812 1491584 99% /mnt/sda5 /dev/sda1 102396 25132 77264 25% /mnt/sda1 /dev/sda3 104854396 102498716 2355680 98% /mnt/sda3 panteltje20: ~ # mount /dev/root on / type reiserfs (rw,relatime) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw) /dev/sda9 on /mnt/sda9 type reiserfs (rw) /dev/sda8 on /mnt/sda8 type reiserfs (rw) /dev/sda7 on /mnt/sda7 type reiserfs (rw) /dev/sda5 on /mnt/sda5 type reiserfs (rw) /dev/sda1 on /mnt/sda1 type ntfs (ro) /dev/sda3 on /mnt/sda3 type reiserfs (rw)

panteltje20: ~ # uname -a Linux panteltje20 2.6.37.6 #3 SMP Sat Apr 9 22:49:32 CDT 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

time .. On partition has a recent Debian, I can boot in that, old Ubuntu, Slackware (using now) etc etc..

But as to where it goes.... the world has mainly gone nuts, now there is a mass hysteria about saving the climate, little kids got brainwashed years ago by the evil Al Gore, now get into a position of power, tear down the nuclear power plants all over Germany but in reality climate will change in a very predictable way:

formatting link
set by the changes in orbit of the earth around the sun, in the past civilizations have come and gone because of those effects. NOTHING to Do in any way by the little effect we have making CO2 or whatever gases.

No it is now about selling new stuff The rulers that are just want to tax .... profit, same for computahs and, just like in the dark ages religion (the Church) falsified real science and kept the people ignorant and manipulated the masses they still do that today, when the Viking mars experiment was positive for life it was denied hours later by the powers that rule you and no experiment ever looked for life on mars again.

You are being played, you must buy more, pay more taxes, and believe this earth is the only place where life exists (no tax breaks elsewhere???) Hey I would volunteer for a trip to mars with Elon's spaceship. :-0 ;-)

Anyways now the US dirty ducks wants to sanction the EU for using Russian gas, (pipeline from Russia to Germany and the rest of Europe) I begin to see precedent duck and his allies the demoncrates as enemy, threat, Already now EU has declared MS software as a security threat so hopefully all of EU will soon move to a 'simple' version of Linux.. As far as the UK goes I did read this morning they will leave EU on Jan 31, so go play with that duck club and lose.

Rebellion time.

I should have written don't get me started but I did get started revolt!!!!!!

It is important we keep the knowhow of all energy generating methods alive and standby, as we will need that power to survive as species both in the coming hotter climate AND the colder period after that. World geography will change completely, mass migration will happen for survival, and possibly a large amount of human kind will go extinct We need nuclear powered spaceships to colonize other planets, Our little smartphones and raspberries with large scale integration will fail after a few hours in space due to radiation effects... There is work to be done, do it while we still can. Most knowledge of the Roman empire went when it collapsed and dark ages came.. with a duck running that N American collective and it now falling apart from inside out, maybe some (if we as species are very lucky) archaeologist will dig up one of our smartphones thousands of years later and say: wonder how they made those in those day,,,,

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Dangerous bollocks.

You obviously take little notice of the weather. I flew free flight model aircraft for 30 years and have been a glider pilot for the last 20. In both games you need to be aware of what the weather is doing, and in the last 20 years it has changed dramatically: for starters the excellent soaring weather we used to get in late April/early May has vanished, probably as the jet stream has weakened and moved a long way south.

Even Randall Munroe, an ex-NASA engineer and sometime computer nerd gets the picture. See:

formatting link

--
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Limited I feel unless you have some of the superb commercial software to use with it. Unfortunately many of the developers have jumped ship so little new stuff is available. Having said that the OS is still being developed including some commercial software. Many of the PD offerings are excellent - I'm still using software developed by you many years ago. As I see it the biggest issue for RISC OS is the lack of a JavaScript browser although I've been informed that one or two are in development - always optimistic!

As you imply Druck it uses the tiniest of resources and because it's not constantly having to access the disc an SD card lasts much longer (years perhaps) than it would with a Linux based system.

Richard

Reply to
Richard Ashbery

They would not listen; They're not listing still. perhaps they never will :(

I've pointed various people to this site. Sadly, most of them simply don't

*want* to understand.
--
W J G
Reply to
Folderol

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Dec 2019 10:26:37 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie wrote in :

Try to read and understand the link I gave before you babble about your hobbies.

You should be able to add some sine waves and extrapolate yourself for the future from the past, see superposition of orbital effects on the bottom of that page. then you can see how fast climate can and DID change in the past, then take your bollocks and swollow those, sadly brainwashed poster.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

I fly model aircraft too. The weather here hasn't changed one iota. In 50 years.

It did get a bit warmer betweem 1970 amd 1990, but it stoped and has got no warmer and maybe a little cooler.

jet streams have cycles

--
  ?A leader is best When people barely know he exists. Of a good leader,  
who talks little,When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,They will say,  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Te problem is that climate change, like nuclear power, has been teh object of massive propaganda. In both cases if you spend a few years digging down and understanding the issues, you can tell that vast sums are being laid out to lie about both.

Neither is a problem. Both have been demonised. For profit.

If you look at that xxcd graph te data in te last 30 years is basically an invention, not actual temeperatures.

And when rate of change of temperature has been that rapid in the past it simply doesn't show on the proxy records.

--
Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that  
doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

You cannot see rapid changes in the geoligical proxy record. Not because there were none, but because they dont show up.

We cant see rapid changes today - except in thermometers that have had cities and airports built round them.

Scary climate change depends on postive feedback that has been shown does not exist and cannot exist, or the past climate would not have been what it was.

If current temperatures are rising it is with 99% confidence not due to CO2.

There is almost no correlation berween temperature rise and CO2 increase.

In fact as a spoof I drew some graphs yeas ago to show that the rise in temperature correlated better with the increase in air transport since WWII.

Contrails...

--
Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that  
doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.