[SOLVED] Raspi 4 Question

Plumped in the end for a RasPi 4 Lablists Kit. It had one great advantage which I didn't realise - a preloaded Raspbian OS on the SD card. It's messy to boot an Arm CPU. You have to get that up before you boot the kernel.

Edit: I also got a wifi keyboard/mouse and it all sings for under €130.

Glad to see you got something going that's working for you, and for less than you first thought for the whole package. The "$35 computer" was never true, but I found I could keep my total cost reasonable for me.

Getting a kit and all the accessories you need from the same place with one order is convenient. Raspbian also has some really cool extra software for free, like Mathematica and Wolfram, although I haven't started digging into it yet.

You wrote that you probably wouldn't want NOOBS, but since you want to run this as an entertainment system, I'm curious if you are looking at running an entertainment focused distro eventually. The kit I bought included NOOBS on an SD card, which includes both Raspbian and LibrElec. Raspbian was easy to install from NOOBS, and that's downloadable from RPi's website.

With that said, I'm still using Slackware way more than Raspbian on my RPi4, so far mostly to do things with an Arduino without having to fire up my desktop, but eventually I expect to use it for more and more projects.

When the beat up laptop that's now been recycled to an entertainment centre gives up the ghost, I will look to replace it with an RPi or similar, so I'm curious if you're satisfied with running Raspbian (or eventually something else) for that purpose.

TKS

Yes, mainly.So far, It's failed on Flash, and the zoom.us software doesn't wort. With Chromium, whatsapp web doesn't go either (They want you to add chrome, but I don't want chrome) so I added Palemoon. That does whatsapp web, but fails on media sound :-/. I'm not even going there.

Netflix won't accept a login, youtube is fine, and mp4s download & play. Putlocker goes well. Despite being caged, I have a limited stomach for entertainment.

I use Raspbian desktop, as I don't need all the programming extras, (added Firefox as my browser, as that's what I normally use), it all works well enough, but I'm still looking for an O/S more to my liking, (including the BSDs).

I've been looking at the alternative offerings in terms of an OS, because I find it three times as difficult to do anything out of the ordinary. You need to adjust a config file, but the config file isn't there, and you have to battle a monolith like systemd, or networkmanager. I'm not offered firefox - I think it would be a compile.

The holy grail here would be a slackware-like multilib thing, with 64bit libs in /lib64 & /usr/lib64 & 32bit libs in /lib & /usr/lib. Then you could run stuff. Slackware's Arm efforts are 32bit only. Suse's offerings are confused, Ubuntu offers a server distro in 64bit. Neither of those would be a major improvement over Debian. Arch have a good get-you-going guide, and seems the most promising. The Installation tab H E R E

I've looked at Gentoo, OpenBSD, FujuIta, SliTaz, Fatdog, & a couple of others, including Devuan.

So far none really appeal to me, but work is ongoing, so maybe I'll find the one for me yet.


Edit: [quote]I'm not offered firefox - I think it would be a compile.[/code]
No, I downloaded/installed my Firefox.

Firefox on RPi

1. First, make sure that Raspbian is completely up to date. You can do this by running the following two commands. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade 2. Now that’s done, install Firefox ESR using the following command. sudo apt-get install firefox-esr 3. Once that has finished running, you should now have Firefox installed. To find the browser simply go to the Menu->Internet->Firefox ESR.

Originally Posted by fatmac I've looked at Gentoo, OpenBSD, FujuIta, SliTaz, Fatdog, & a couple of others, including Devuan. So far none really appeal to me, but work is ongoing, so maybe I'll find the one for me yet.

The next OS I would like to try is OpenBSD, but the last time I checked, it wouldn’t run on an RPi4.

OpenBSD can run on RPi3, and I found a good reference (which linked to other references), which after reading 3 times sounded like it wouldn’t be too hard. I still have to check if a desktop environment or window manager is available.

Since I don’t have an RPi3 and no reason to get one, I’ll wait at least until (if) OpenBSD is available for RPi4.

TKS

Yes, sorry for any confusion, I was mainly talking about those that I have tried on the RPi3B.
(I think I've only found Gentoo that ran on the RPi4).