From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.advocacy

My nephew was in MicroCenter and saw the Raspberry Pi 400 on sale
(clearance?) for $40, so he picked one up for himself and sent one to me.
I'm having fun with it.

It runs on a Broadcom (ARM) quad core CPU (BCM2711, ARM Cortex A72). It has
4 GBs of RAM, WiFi, BlueTooth, two mini HDMI ports, an SD port, a GB
Ethernet port, two USB 3.x ports and one USB 2.x port. It's powered through
a USB-C port (5 volts, 3 AMPs minimum). It also has that Raspberry Pi pinout whatever for all kinds of add-ons, which I know nothing about. So I have an ARM Linux machine now.

It runs on either Debian Bookworm (32 bit) or Debian Trixie (64-bit), plus a whole bunch of others. For some reason the original microSD came with the 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS. Which, to me, is interesting for one reason. The 64-bit Trelby Arm AppImage worked on the 32-bit OS. The creator
of that AppImage told me the this happened because the CPU is 64-bit, and
the AppImage was so self-contained that it didn't look for any libraries
(not even the "linking libraries" — whatever they are). He told me that I was probably the first one who tried this. So being clueless and doing
stupid things has it benefits. :)

This is not a powerful machine and microSD card media is s-l-o-w. So, I followed the instructions to set the machine up to use a 64-bit
version of the Raspberry Pi OS on a USB 3.x drive (SanDisk Ultra Fit, about the size of a mouse dongle) and am using that for my "hard drive." Much faster. No one will mistake the 400 for an i7 Linux computer, but it streams TubiTV and YouTube well (YouTube at 720p) and works pretty well overall. It uses LXDE as its desktop environment and OpenBox as its Window Manager (so light weight). It came defaulted to Wayland, but its configuration
application "raspi-config" easily allowed me to move to X11, which seems to
be a bit smoother on this computer.

I've installed Trelby, the ARM version of Simplenote, DOSBox-X with dBase, Wordstar and ScriptThing — all work fine. Jstar is there, all the Firefox customizations work. So it's a usable, Linux ARM computer. No fan, but a
huge heat sink and runs at about 40 degrees Celsius. It also came with PDF versions of the Raspberry Pi book (274 pages) and PDF versions of 134 MagPi magazines (issue 31 through 164, which is the current (April) magazine.
These magazines take me back to the old computer magazines. 120 pages of articles (some ads) with programs and programming tips in the newest
magazine, and lots about kits and stuff that's way above my pay grade. It's almost nostalgic, takes me back to when I was young.

And the surprising thing. This computer was made in England, not China. At
any rate, this has been taking up my time. It's like going back to earlier days of computing. If you live near a MicroCenter you might want to look
into one of these.

I meant to mention, this 400 is using the 6.12 Linux kernel (probably what Debian Trixie is using).
--
Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews. Zionism ≠ Judaism.
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.advocacy

On Fri, 17 Apr 2026 03:27:41 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I meant to mention, this 400 is using the 6.12 Linux kernel (probably
what Debian Trixie is using).

Mt Pi 5 has the Trixie Raspberry Pi Os and is 6.12. One thing to watch if
you update the OS -- currently sudo doesn't ask for a password but future releases will. That could impact scripts that depend on sudo working
silently.

The Pi 5 is getting hammered by the RAM and component price increases. So
far the Orange Pi has been holding down the prices. It won't be pretty but
I won't shed tears if this AI bubble pops sometime soon.
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.advocacy

On 2026-04-17, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Fri, 17 Apr 2026 03:27:41 -0000 (UTC), RonB wrote:

I meant to mention, this 400 is using the 6.12 Linux kernel (probably
what Debian Trixie is using).

Mt Pi 5 has the Trixie Raspberry Pi Os and is 6.12. One thing to watch if you update the OS -- currently sudo doesn't ask for a password but future releases will. That could impact scripts that depend on sudo working silently.

Looks like my upgrade already does that. Not that it will affect me much.

The Pi 5 is getting hammered by the RAM and component price increases. So far the Orange Pi has been holding down the prices. It won't be pretty but
I won't shed tears if this AI bubble pops sometime soon.

I thought Orange Pi was a division of Raspberry Pi (until I looked).
Obviously it's not. It looks like there are a couple other board makers as well. If I was younger and had half a brain, I would probably like building out some of the projects.
--
Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews. Zionism ≠ Judaism.
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