[GTALUG] Raspberry Pi

[Aruna Hewapathirane]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 8:42 AM Stewart Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On Thu., Mar. 4, 2021, 22:48 Aruna Hewapathirane, <
> aruna.hewapathirane at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Oh my .. Thank you so much Stewart. Nearest major intersection is
>> Lawrence Ave West and Caledonia Road.
>>
>
> Ah; other end of town. We can work something out.
>

I can come to any subway station on the Kennedy line or anywhere on the LRT
line. I don't drive Stewart am a confirmed TTC-cerian and pedestrian.

>
> I've also got a FireFly SBC you can have. Twice the memory, built-in
> (small) bootable storage, about as fast as the Raspberry Pi 3. Seems to be
> 32-bit ARM only (unlike Raspberry Pi, which can go 64-bit, but that's
> slightly futile in 1 GB), and kernel upgrades and boot process is fiddly.
> Nice machine, but minimal community support.
>

Wow thanks :-)


> I was thinking of cross compiling then moving it to the Pi ? What do you
>>> think  ? A lot faster and very much
>>>
>> less error prone ?
>>
>
> The Raspberry Pi's kernel is still (IIRC) not 100% mainstream, so some
> magic may be required. The supplied and supported Debian-derived Raspberry
> Pi OS is 32-bit, but has a userland that has all the built-in hardware
> supported. Go to any other OS and you lose that. I've never felt the need
> to go outside that.
>
> Understood. I just want to try and build the smallest lightest kernel.
Like puppy linux or knoppix. I use Debian at home so this is good news.


> I was a little surprised to see you running Raspberry Pi OS on VirtualBox.
>

Well I was surprised myself. After what Giles said I wanted to test this
but had no hardware or a Pi to test on. So I gave Virtualbox a shot and it
did work :-)


> Looks like you're running the x86 Raspberry Pi Desktop for Intel -
> supplied and maintained by the Foundation so old PCs can be reused as
> workalike devices in the classroom.
>

This is one major reason why I am starting to explore SBC's. Someday I want
to get a computer ( Pi or Firefly or other SBC ) into every single home in
resource poor settings like say Zambia where I grew up most of
my teen years or Sri Lanka where I was born or even the Phillipines where
the poverty level bought tears to my eyes after watching youtube
documentaries. I know big dreams.. who knows... nothing ventured.. nothing
gained eh :-)


> The Raspberry Pi boards are all ARM, so you'd be running something
> different and your cross-compilation would need to add an armhf step.
> Unless VirtualBox has gone all ARM too, you're not running the same OS at
> all.
>

I did not have time yesterday to try QEMU. I will setup QEMU later today
and put Raspberry Pi OS through all the hoops and loops. I am going to try
anyway.


>
> Cheers
>  Stewart
>
>
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