Recently I purchased Brian's Pi, the model previous to the one that is out now ' it's model 3B which has the following specs:
Quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 CPU @ 1.2 GHz
400MHz VideoCore IV GPU
1GB LPDDR2-900 SDRAM
802.11n Wireless LAN
Bluetooth 4.1
Brian also gave me a power supply and an 8 GB micro-SD card with it as well as the case it's in.
I don't know if anything was on the SD card but I decided to start fresh by downloading NOOBS. It's the installer tool that Raspberry Pi provides if you buy it with a card. NOOBS gives you the choice of installing Raspbian (Debian enhanced for the Pi). It's easy to put the installer on the SD card. I used my laptop and the MicroSD-to-SD card adapter since it has an SD card reader and simply unzipped the files unto it after reformatting. Then slipped it into the Pi, plugged it into my monitor, keyboard and mouse, and the power last and it booted up.
A Small Challenge
The NOOBS installer comes up and gives you a choice of what to install but here's the strange bit, although 8 GB is the minimum needed for NOOBS according to Pi's website, it still said there wasn't enough space to put it on. After some messing about trying the whole procedure again, I read about NOOBS Lite which hardly takes up any room but downloads everything it needs. So put that on a card and chose Raspian.
It probably took about an hour to install. Downloading the files didn't take long, most of the time was spent installing. It looked like at times that the install had stopped and I was worried but I left it and it finished. So be patient if you're doing this and you think it's hung.
You sure are purty
Raspian uses a desktop they've called Pixel. It looks like a customized LXDE but it might even be lighter. On bootup, only 110 MB out of 1 GB of RAM is used. Right now I'm running Chromium with 3 tabs open, a terminal, LibreOffice Writer and Task Manager is showing about half of the total RAM. It comes with a pleasant background but there are 15 other nice wallpapers to choose from, mostly landscapes. Text is crisp on my 24' LED display and large enough to read. The icons they use beside program names and in the file manager are very pleasing to look at and welcoming without looking unprofessional.
Stuff included
Raspian comes with Chromium and I recommend you use it. You can choose to install Firefox (the ESR version) using their software manager but it hasn't been optimized for the Pi as Chromium has so it's laggy at times and uses more memory.
It comes with LibreOffice 6 installed, CLAWS for email, VNC for remote access, VLC for playing files, Minecraft Pi, Python games, the usual accessories (file manager, terminal, editor, archiver, etc) and a lot of programming tools for use with Java and Python, Mathematica, Scratch and Wolfram.
It's certainly slower than most desktop PCs, even those from 10 years ago. The main lag is in loading programs and sometimes in website rendering (depends on how much JavaScript is used). But it's still very usable and a joy. I'm quite impressed. These are just my thoughts after using 2 or 3 times over the last few days. I wrote this article in LibreOffice Writer and posted it using my Pi.
It will probably become a NAS used for media files shortly but I'm going to try a bunch of things with it including probably re-visiting electronics. Feel free to give me your suggestions especially any Pi tips you've learned for those that have one. And let me know how you're using it.
https://forums.plugintolinux.ca/index.php/topic,187.msg1018.html#msg1018
Jason, you might be interested in this PLUG Forum topic about having the Pi boot from a usb drive. Apparently the Pi runs faster from a usb drive.
I second Bill's suggestion. The version of Raspian I originally used was really slow on my 3B, but I understand that the newer version has been better optimized to run on a pi. It's certainly more attractive, based on your screenshot. The slowness applies to running it as a regular computer. It does much better as a media centre.
Thanks for that reminder, Fox. It's not really slow for me, it's just slower compared to my i5 obviously. It is quite usable. I think that previous versions of Raspian desktop environment used more RAM. But I'll still look into it to see if it will improve performance. I had remembered you could do this but didn't remember where I had seen it. So appreciate the link to the forum topic discussing running from a USB drive.
Two questions:
#1. Any idea how many in the club use or maybe 'play' with Raspberry? I can think of four.
#2. If you buy everything new, and compare it to buying a desktop, I assume the difference in cost would narrow down to all the bits and pieces, wires, connectors, case, whatevers, that are needed to make the 'computer', what would be the dollar savings, and what would be the disadvantages?
I haven't tried the latest version of Raspian and I also haven't played with my rPi 3B in about a year, but based on previous experience with Raspian and Ubuntu Mate, I don't consider the rPi a reasonable substitute for a desktop computer unless you cannot afford anything more expensive. It was just too slow; frustratingly slow. To me, its utility is all the specific projects one can do with it - file server, media server, robot, running cameras or appliances, etc. Maybe that's different with the latest version of Raspian, and with the pi 4.
Quote from: buster on August 12, 2019, 11:41:34 AM
Two questions:
#1. Any idea how many in the club use or maybe 'play' with Raspberry? I can think of four.
I can think of about the same number.
Quote from: buster on August 12, 2019, 11:41:34 AM
#2. If you buy everything new, and compare it to buying a desktop, I assume the difference in cost would narrow down to all the bits and pieces, wires, connectors, case, whatevers, that are needed to make the 'computer', what would be the dollar savings, and what would be the disadvantages?
No, the difference is more than that. The speed is still much slower than a desktop although I found it very usable unlike Mike but I don't know if Mike's version was using Pixel or the previous desktop. The processor you're using in a Pi is similar to the kind you'd see in a smartphone, probably a mid-range phone though the phone will likely have a little more RAM and more storage than the default 8 GB.
You're limited in what you can do with it in terms of a desktop. It's fine for web browsing as long as you don't use Firefox which is a pig on it. You can watch videos full-screen at 1080p but there does appear to be some frame dropping going on when that's happening. You probably don't want to multi-task on it a lot especially with full-sized applications like office suites but you can do a little as I've shown. Sorry, I didn't think of trying Tuxracer, Buster!
You can't connect a SATA drive to it directly so you're limited in storage to USB drives which are USB 2 so not as fast. If you get a drive enclosure you could do this, though but you'd still be limited to USB 2 speeds.
A new Pi costs about $35 USD but then you need to buy a case, micro-SD card, HDMI cable and power supply. So you're talking about $80 CAD if I'm right. You can get a used desktop that will be much faster for not much more. But if you're comparing to a new desktop, the minimum would probably be $200-300 without the accessories.
The clear advantages with it is that it's quiet (no cooling on it), uses little power and is small. You could attach it to the back of a monitor if you wanted.
Sum up: Fine for a basic desktop for most users - word processing, web browsing, playing videos. But due to it's small size, and low energy use, great for single uses like the ones that Mike mentioned.
Mike has reported the following, after our Tim Hortons PLUG Mug get together.
"I was inspired to test my Pi3 at home after our meeting, connected to a 1080p monitor. My version of Ubuntu Mate (16.04) is truly awful; I wouldn't call it usable at all. Kodi (also an old version) is more responsive, but when I tried to play a video residing on my usb stick, the playback was jerky."
I suspect the issue could be running the RPi OS from the usb2 pendrive.
I am able to stream 720P movies from my RPi (I will have to check out a 1080P movie) on my HD TV without any issues and people do use the RPi as a media server, so I think the RPi should play a 1080P movie without a problem.
I'm thinking of buying a Samsung EVO Plus SD card today at Best Buy ($20 for 32 GB model); this gives 95 mb/sec read speed. It's probably overkill for an Rpi 3B, but as far as I know, you don't get the same speed restrictions in the Pi's SD slot as you do in its usb 2 ports. Anyone know whether there is a speed bottleneck in the SD slot of a Pi 3?
I think that this will be a better test of its potential utility as a desktop computer than my current setup. It would be nice to know what speed level Jason's SD card supports for comparison.
Fox, check out Staples store. Online they have a 32GB, 95MB/s Lexar SD card for $8.99. The store may have the same promotion.
Reviews of Lexar cards on Best Buy are quite negative - high failure rates. But since my last post I've been doing some reading about the SD card performance on a Pi 3, and they are (1) quite limited by the bus; (2) deteriorate over time because use makes it take longer to find the relevant bits for applications. Now I'm thinking that maybe the usb 2 speed is, in fact, faster. And I'm not sure anymore that it's worth $20 to buy a fast SD card for a Pi. Some testing on Pi 4 seems to suggest the same, and that you'll do better booting from a usb 3 port with a fast usb 3 stick or external SSD.
Quote from: fox on August 17, 2019, 08:56:41 AM
It would be nice to know what speed level Jason's SD card supports for comparison.
It sure would be but I can't find the specs for the micro-SD card that came with it despite doing lots of searches. It's a good name, though. It's a SanDisk EDGE 8 GB and it also says MICROSD HC 1 on it with a #1 in what appears to be a bin logo, kind of like a U. In any case, I ran speed tests on it using some benchmarking software in Windows 10 and from memory, I think it came in at 30 Mbps read and 12 Mbps write (not maximums, average throughput) - I might have to check it again. Apparently the Pi 3B only supports up to 25 Mbps bandwidth on the memory card interface (the Pi 4 does double that).
You should try it with the latest Raspian though, which is based on Debian 10 (buster). I think the OS makes a huge difference in how much RAM is available. You might also want to make sure that you have some space left on your memory card (if you're using 8 GB) after setup because I think it might use a swap file and not a swap partition.
I will buy the Lexar sd card and test it out with my RPi.
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on August 17, 2019, 10:28:00 AM
Quote from: fox on August 17, 2019, 08:56:41 AM
It would be nice to know what speed level Jason's SD card supports for comparison.
It sure would be but I can't find the specs for the micro-SD card that came with it despite doing lots of searches. It's a good name, though. It's a SanDisk EDGE 8 GB and it also says MICROSD HC 1 on it with a #1 in what appears to be a bin logo, kind of like a U. In any case, I ran speed tests on it using some benchmarking software in Windows 10 and from memory, I think it came in at 30 Mbps read and 12 Mbps write (not maximums, average throughput) - I might have to check it again. Apparently the Pi 3B only supports up to 25 Mbps bandwidth on the memory card interface (the Pi 4 does double that).
You should try it with the latest Raspian though, which is based on Debian 10 (buster). I think the OS makes a huge difference in how much RAM is available. You might also want to make sure that you have some space left on your memory card (if you're using 8 GB) after setup because I think it might use a swap file and not a swap partition.
I can't remember - did you find your Raspberry Pi 3 unusable as a desktop along with Mike? And were you using the latest Raspian?
I haven t done a great deal of usage, with my RPi, but i don t recall having any lagging like mike was having. I am going to get back to using the RPi with the latest OS and see how it works playing 1080P video on my hf tv and the quickness of a browser surfing the internet. I will be using the Opera browser.
I'm posting this from Raspbian installed on my Rpi 3 using BerryBoot and booting from my usb stick. This is much faster than Ubuntu Mate 16.04, and quite usable. Everything responds faster. Menus appear faster, moving in files and folders, application startup, window closures and all window manipulations. Great to see this! But I'm curious whether this is due to Raspbian itself, or whether other distros available for the Pi have been similarly optimised. I might try the current version of Ubuntu Mate to see if it's better.
One interesting thing on the software side - Chromium is installed but Firefox isn't. And Firefox isn't even in the Raspbian repository.
"One interesting thing on the software side - Chromium is installed but Firefox isn't. And Firefox isn't even in the Raspbian repository."
Maybe the software delivered in the binaries are made especially to have a small footprint, and be quick, and that would include updates to the software as well. Manpower can't be infinite. One is easier to maintain than two. Does the Chromium appear to be as full fledged as the ones you download in a Linux distro like say Kubuntu? Just a theory.
Turns out that Firefox (ESR) is in the repository, but add/remove software app didn't see it. Once I added Synaptic, Firefox was there. I just installed it, and it's fine, though Chromium does appear to be faster.
In further testing, Raspbian does very poorly in the video department. It stutters badly and stalls with youtube videos, and won't play any downloaded videos that I tried that reside on my usb stick. Going back to Ubuntu Mate 16.04, it does only slightly better with the videos. I don't understand why this is because LibreElectric 8.0(with Kodi (17) has no trouble playing those videos, and they don't even stutter. Could it be settings? Missing drivers? RAM use?
I'm downloading Xubuntu 18.04 and LibreElectric 9.0.2 to see how they fare.
Try also installing VLC.
VLC was already installed in Raspbian; it couldn't run a video from there. I just installed Xubuntu. The BerryBoot image was pretty barebones; didn't even have a browser. I had to enable a repository and then install Synaptic, Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird and VLC. Even LibreOffice was missing, but I can install that as well. Youtube videos work in the browsers but are choppy. VLC played the movie I tried, but it was choppy. It seems like LIbreElectric/Kodi is the answer for video playback on an Rpi3.
Mike, I mentioned Chromium in the beginning as being the installed browser. And my experience trying out Firefox. And thought Firefox ESR is in the repository, I found it didn't work as well as Chromium. Clearly you didn't read my initial post :o . Anyway, Firefox was very laggy scrolling and loading pages and at times it just seemed to freeze for seconds at a time. Very annoying.
Buster, Chromium is the open source browser that Chrome is based around. It's a fully-loaded browser except that it doesn't include Flash which is becoming less of an issue as time goes on. But you can add Flash to it, and the version in Raspian already has a Flash plugin installed for it.
Mike: You didn't mention if you were still trying to view the video directly from the USB stick or after having transferred it. I didn't try playing a downloaded video. I'll do that next time I'm playing with my Pi.
Quote from: ssfc72 on August 17, 2019, 11:41:39 AM
I haven t done a great deal of usage, with my RPi, but i don t recall having any lagging like mike was having. I am going to get back to using the RPi with the latest OS and see how it works playing 1080P video on my hf tv and the quickness of a browser surfing the internet. I will be using the Opera browser.
Is Opera in the repositories for Raspian or another Pi OS? Because they don't see to have an ARM version on their website that I see and it's not open source so they'd have to make one specifically for the ARM processors.
Just tested a 1080 video file at 30 fps and it works perfectly playing it off the micro-SD card at full screen. Tried playing a 60 fps version of the same video but there must be something wrong with that file as it doesn't play at all.
Try a YouTube video, Jason. Regarding your earlier question, the videos reside on my USB stick, but so does the distro. At any rate, the same videos play well from LibreElectric/Kodi. I’m now wondering if it’s a codec problem.
When you lose track of time and spend too many hours with your teenie tiny Raspberry Pi, and then you turn off the wee little thing and walk into the next room, does it feel as if the world is filled with giants, and the furniture is huge???
Quote from: fox on August 17, 2019, 07:22:22 PM
Try a YouTube video, Jason. Regarding your earlier question, the videos reside on my USB stick, but so does the distro. At any rate, the same videos play well from LibreElectric/Kodi. I’m now wondering if it’s a codec problem.
I have. I mentioned this before. Maybe it wasn't clear that I was referring to videos on websites - I tested with YouTube:
QuoteYou're limited in what you can do with it in terms of a desktop. It's fine for web browsing as long as you don't use Firefox which is a pig on it. You can watch videos full-screen at 1080p but there does appear to be some frame dropping going on when that's happening.
I don't think it's a codec issue unless they were different videos you tested. As I mentioned above, I can play full-screen 1080p@30 fps fine. I'm not sure if I have any 60 fps videos to test it with. How hot does your processor get? I'm wondering if the particulars of your case are causing it to get too hot and the processor is throttling down. But then, I seem to recall you had a heat sink or two.
Quote from: buster on August 17, 2019, 07:31:32 PM
When you lose track of time and spend too many hours with your teenie tiny Raspberry Pi, and then you turn off the wee little thing and walk into the next room, does it feel as if the world is filled with giants, and the furniture is huge???
You never fail to amuse, Harry! :D I haven't had that experience yet but it is kind of cool that it's small enough that when it occasionally gives me a the temperature warning, I just put it front of my table fan.
Oops! You are right, the Opera browser is not available for the RPi. :-( I must have been just using the default browser of whatever RPi OS, that I had installed.
I normally always install Opera in an OS that I am running, so I just assumed that I had Opera installed. Wrong! :-)
Apparently the Vivaldi browser (which is similar to Opera) is available for the RPi.
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on August 17, 2019, 04:36:44 PM
Quote from: ssfc72 on August 17, 2019, 11:41:39 AM
I haven t done a great deal of usage, with my RPi, but i don t recall having any lagging like mike was having. I am going to get back to using the RPi with the latest OS and see how it works playing 1080P video on my hf tv and the quickness of a browser surfing the internet. I will be using the Opera browser.
Is Opera in the repositories for Raspian or another Pi OS? Because they don't see to have an ARM version on their website that I see and it's not open source so they'd have to make one specifically for the ARM processors.
Quote from: buster on August 17, 2019, 07:31:32 PM
When you lose track of time and spend too many hours with your teenie tiny Raspberry Pi, and then you turn off the wee little thing and walk into the next room, does it feel as if the world is filled with giants, and the furniture is huge???
I like that, Harry! And it was definitely true of me yesterday (and might be today). I hadn't touched my Pi for at least a year. Now I'm in experimental mode. I didn't step outside of the house at all yesterday!
Today's experiments involve updating the Raspbian and Xubuntu distros and testing their ability to show videos, but this time with my fan hooked up to eliminate any throttling effects. I don't like the fan; it's noisy and runs constantly, but I'm sure there are programs to turn it off when not needed. I actually did the updates to Raspbian last night, but didn't get a chance to test it. I also updated Xubuntu (substantial update), but it froze when halfway done and won't fully boot, so I either have to reinstall it or get into it during the boot sequence and complete the update from the command line. (Close your ears, Harry. :)) I might also try another distro from the BerryBoot site. I'll be posting later.
Brief update. I updated my Raspbian installation to see if that would improve anything. It didn't. I'm still puzzled as to why that distro, of all distros, won't play YouTube or mp4 videos. With YouTube, I fiddled around a bit with Chromium settings and occasionally got something playing. But the same video wouldn't play again later. I couldn't find anything online to address this problem. Maybe by comparing settings with Jason? I also wonder if it could be specific to the bootloader settings used by BerryBoot, since Jason is using Noobs.
Ubuntu Mate 16.04 is updated, but its performance may actually be worse right now, as Firefox will no longer run at all. I can get YouTube videos running on Chromium, but they do occasionally stall or stutter. I found an image for Ubuntu Mate 18.04, and will try it out shortly.
My Xubuntu installation couldn't be repaired (at least not by me), so I blew it away and am starting over. Right now I am upgrading it, but unlike the last disastrous effort, I'm doing it with "apt dist-upgrade". (Yes, Harry - command line). Once that is done, I'll have to install the browsers again to try it out. Stay tuned.
Quote from: fox on August 18, 2019, 11:58:21 AM
Maybe by comparing settings with Jason? I also wonder if it could be specific to the bootloader settings used by BerryBoot, since Jason is using Noobs.
Originally I did that but I had trouble getting the full install of Raspian going so once I discovered that you could just use Etcher, I downloaded the Raspian ISO and did that. That might be worth trying for you. What also might be worth trying at the next MUG is we bring our Pi 3Bs and I'll bring my 24" HDMI monitor (unless you have something smaller) and you use my microSD card. Maybe your card is just really slow unless you're still using your USB port. By doing that we could remove any variables related to the how the distro has been configured. I haven't tried running a distro from the USB port so I have no idea if perhaps on the Pi 3B the port has been stymied in terms of speed though it would be remarkable if it was so bottlenecked as to be slower than 25 Mbps which is the top speed of the SD card interface apparently.
Regarding throttling, there is a panel add-on that shows the temperature of the processor and another one that shows the speed. So you could use those to see if that is happening with or without your fan.
My Pi distros are all booted off the usb drive, although the first step is that the SD card is accessed to tell the Pi where to find the boot files. If I had a spare micro SD card sitting around, I would try Raspbian on it, but I don't. I also don't need Raspbian for anything in particular.
Another experiment completed. Xubuntu 18.04 is the best distro I have tried so far on the Pi, excluding the more specialized LibreElectric. I have updated it successfully except for a new kernel install (we can look at the errors the next time we meet). It runs pretty fluidly, and YouTube videos work pretty well on either Firefox or Chromium. Regular movies also play pretty well on VLC. In both cases, there is a very minor lag between sound and picture, but I didn't detect any stuttering. These play better in LibreElectric, but they are certainly playable in Xubuntu. Raspbian is as responsive as Xubuntu, but poor with videos. Ubuntu Mate 16.04 is much slower than the other two, but I have downloaded Ubuntu Mate 18.04, and will try that next.
The 18.04 Ubuntu Mate Pi image wouldn't boot through BerryBoot, so that's the end of the experiment for now. (Note that this particular image wasn't prepared for BerryBoot, or at least it wasn't on the BerryBoot site.) In any case, I wasn't optimistic about it anyway, since the 16.04 version was quite laggy. I am curious about what was on it, as the image was a whopping 5GB in size. The other images range from less than 500mb to about 2GB.
Well it looks like we might have a new contender. This one came to me from the BerryBoot site; I am registered and I get emails every time Alex loads a new image. The image of interest is called RaspEX, and it comes in two variants, one with Kodi. It is Debian and Ubuntu-based. i am downloading the smaller, regular variant, and will report back. A member of the RaspEX describes it as running a Raspberry Pi on steroids. Read about it here (https://sourceforge.net/projects/raspex-kodi/).
RaspEx is interesting. It runs a highly customized LXDE desktop; though the desktop is somewhat gaudy looking. It also appears to need some extra setup steps, which I haven't tried. For some reason, its file application sees the usb stick it resides on, but it won't open any files from any of its three partitions, so I can't try running a movie on it. But I did try a YouTube video, and it handled that pretty well. Maybe we can look at this at the PLUG MUG and figure out how to open its files.
You need to share a screenshot of this gaudy desktop. We must see it!
Well I made a screenshot, but never had a chance to post it. I tried following the instructions of that distro and I ended up blowing away the bootloader. Now my rpi won't boot. Meanwhile, I tried downloading Noobs and transferring it to my SD card, but it wouldn't boot either. Upon consultation with Jason, I found out that he used Raspbian directly, not Noobs, so I'm trying that now.
Noobs originally booted for me but there wasn't enough room left to install Raspbian so then I switched to Noobs lite which worked fine but it more or less downloaded Raspian to install it. After playing around with it for a while, I decided to just see if Raspian could go on it directly which is what I did in the end. That was after having read that Etcher can handle the entire process of putting Raspian onto the SD card and I just wanted to see if that was the case. It was.
Note that the Noobs Lite image has a lot more options to choose from for installation choices but I think everything is downloaded. Risc OS was on there, too.
Perhaps that distro blowing away my setup was for the best. I just tried Raspbian on the SD card, which I set up with Etcher. It is very responsive; more so than any distro I tried on my usb stick. Playback of the same YouTube video I've tried on all distros was superior to any of the distro on my usb stick except possibly LibreElec. Same with playback of a movie I had on the usb stick; much more fluid and with audio and video in better sync than what I saw on Raspbian, Ubuntu Mate, Xubuntu or Lubuntu on the stick. Windows opened quickly and movement of them was fluid. LibreOffice Writer was slow on the first boot; much better thereafter. I would say that Raspbian set up this way (on SD card) is quite usable.
What I would like to do next is figure out how to add LibreElec and get a grub to choose which of the two to boot. When I tried copying the files from my download of Noobs (which does allow multiple booting) onto my SD card, the card wouldn't boot. Topic for PLUG MUG tonight?
It's LibreELEC. Glad it's working for you.
I'm astounded that the USB ports are the RPi 3B are so slow. This link (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/usb/README.md) might explain why (emphasis mine):
"The USB ports on a Raspberry Pi have a design loading of 100mA each - sufficient to drive "low-power" devices such as mice and keyboards. Devices such as WiFi adapters, USB hard drives, USB pen drives all consume much more current and should be powered from an external hub with its own power supply. While it is possible to plug a 500mA device into a Pi and have it work with a sufficiently powerful supply, reliable operation is not guaranteed."
So if you has a USB powered HUB that might fix the issue of the flash drive being so slow - the ports have too little power supplied to them. I have such a hub but have to see if I can find the power supply for it.
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on August 22, 2019, 11:23:15 PM
It's LibreELEC. ...
Oops; fixed.
Good to know about the power limitation of the usb ports. I'll have to look in my junk box for a powered hub to see if that makes a difference. Meanwhile, I have Noobs working. The trick, as Jason suggested at PLUG MUG tonight, is to format the SD card with the Noobs Format Tool on a Mac or PC (Mac in this case). Formatting on Linux with gparted didn't cut it. The advantage of Noobs over a straight install of Raspian is that Noobs allows you to install several distros and choose one at startup. In this case I wanted Raspbian and LibreElec, but there were many to choose from. Berryboot is similar to Noobs, but Berryboot allows you to add or delete distros at a later date.
Well apparently you can add other distros to Noobs after it is set up by holding the shift key the next time you boot. This is explained here (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/29328/how-can-i-add-another-operating-system-onto-noobs).
Apparently, one can turn an Rpi into a statistical machine by adding R and RStudio to Raspbian. This isn't as straightforward as adding a distro to Noobs or BerryBoot, as it does involve the compiling of RStudio. But the instructions (shown here) (http://herb.h.kobe-u.ac.jp/raspiinfo/rstudio_en.html) look to be pretty straightforward (cut and paste from a Terminal - sorry Harry). This might be a future project for me, or maybe Jason?
I mentioned at the PLUG Mug last evening to Jason, that he could power his RPi from a battery power bank bought at the dollar store, instead of having to deal with the plug in power supply and long cord. Edit - this would remove one less item, that is chained to your power bar.
The specs on the dollar store power bank are, output 5V, 2.1 Amp (max) which is plenty of current for the RPi. The power bank capacity is 4400 mAH, which should be ample enough for the 2 hours we are at Tim Hortons. :-)
I might be wrong, but my understanding of the usb issue is that the total amount of power supplied to the Rpi isn't relevant; it's the amount supplied to each usb port. I think that this is analogous to the issue of Apple iOS devices that get their power from lightning connectors. (I have an iPad Air 3, which uses lightning.) You can buy a lightning to usb 3 adapter, but it won't see a drive connected to it unless the adapter has a lightning port, and it is plugged into a power source. Even then, certain external drives with relatively large power draws (those containing HDs as opposed to SSDs), will not work.
Quote from: ssfc72 on August 23, 2019, 09:41:10 AM
I mentioned at the PLUG Mug last evening to Jason, that he could power his RPi from a battery power bank bought at the dollar store, instead of having to deal with the plug in power supply and long cord.
The specs on the dollar store power bank are, output 5V, 2.1 Amp (max) which is plenty of current for the RPi. The power bank capacity is 4400 mAH, which should be ample enough for the 2 hours we are at Tim Hortons. :-)
That's a keen idea that I hadn't considered except that it wouldn't have removed my requisite for having had a power supply and long cord. Remember that it was accompanied by a 24" LED display. I'd like to see that run off a battery bank. Maybe if you put ten of them in parallel, it would work :)
I looked up the power requirements for Raspberry Pi 4B here (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/faqs/#pi-power). Although they recommend a 2.5 A power supply for the 3B, they also say in a question about batteries that you can power it from "devices are typically marketed as mobile phone emergency battery chargers." so yeah, it would probably work. But since I don't have a display that can also be powered from one, there's not much to gain from doing so.
I suppose I could use it as a headless display and then SSH or use VNC to control it from a PC or laptop. That might frighten the workers at Timmy's less who might have thought I was moving in. ;D
Quote from: fox on August 23, 2019, 12:33:14 PM
I might be wrong, but my understanding of the usb issue is that the total amount of power supplied to the Rpi isn't relevant; it's the amount supplied to each usb port. I think that this is analogous to the issue of Apple iOS devices that get their power from lightning connectors. (I have an iPad Air 3, which uses lightning.) You can buy a lightning to usb 3 adapter, but it won't see a drive connected to it unless the adapter has a lightning port, and it is plugged into a power source. Even then, certain external drives with relatively large power draws (those containing HDs as opposed to SSDs), will not work.
The link I just posted talks about this and you're right that a lot of it has to do with the draw on the USB ports. It mentions that you should "check the power rating of the devices you plan to connect to the Raspberry Pi and purchase a power supply accordingly. If you're not sure, we would advise you to buy a powered hub." It also mentions that the maximum allowed draw is 1.2 W for the USB ports combined (for the 3B and 4B). They tested the various models using a corded usb keyboard and mouse (I assume), HDMI monitor and wireless access and the 3B uses only 1.34 A under stress conditions (average is 0.85 A). So that's without any other USB devices.
I hate to open the "boot from USB" issue again, but this morning I watched a YouTube video (here) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSGA-63FniU), which suggests that booting from a USB stick is much faster than booting from an SD card. The video is 3 years old, so things might have changed since then, as SD cards have become faster and Pi distros have become more streamlined. Having just switched my installation around to SD card booting from Noobs in place of USB booting from BerryBoot, I think that Raspbian actually runs faster on my Sandisk Ultra SD card than on my PNY 128gb USB3 drive. The aforementioned video also suggests that USB is more stable than SD cards and that the latter have a more limited lifespan, but I haven't used the Pi enough to have seen any negative effects of using the SD card. In my case, my data are kept on the USB drive, so I would imagine that this would greatly reduce any read/write wear on the SD card.
I was in a Rasberry Pi YouTube video mood this morning, and I watched two other videos comparing Raspbian to Ubuntu Mate. One of them (here) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y_yLW9Y7KU) did speed tests between them, and even made a comparison with a regular PC. Both videos indicated that Raspbian is faster (about 20% in the tests), and in my experience, Raspbian was noticeably faster.
Just like with SD cards, thumb drives can vary quite a bit in performance. I tested my flash drives that I had at the time years ago and found surprising differences in performance. I realize that the drive you used is USB 3 but it could be that there is a separate chip for supporting USB 2 on it that isn't very good.
Regardless, you can test read/write speeds of drives using dd (https://www.shellhacks.com/disk-speed-test-read-write-hdd-ssd-perfomance-linux/) (sorry, Harry!). Remember to do the testing on the Pi as we don't know what corners they cut to make it small and cheap.
Quote from: fox on August 23, 2019, 08:21:03 AM
Well apparently you can add other distros to Noobs after it is set up by holding the shift key the next time you boot. This is explained here (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/29328/how-can-i-add-another-operating-system-onto-noobs).
Well I was somewhat wrong about that. With Noobs, holding the shift key does allow you to add or remove distros, but doing so rewrites the whole SD card, blowing away anything you added or customized in the distros present prior to this action. BerryBoot is more functional in that you can add distros without affecting the ones there, or you can remove an installed distro without affecting the others.
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on August 24, 2019, 02:10:03 PM
Just like with SD cards, thumb drives can vary quite a bit in performance.
....
I just found an article (here (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-ssd-test,39811.html)) that not only verifies what you said, but actually shows that booting and opening files can be much slower when the OS is run from a usb3 drive than when it is run from an SD card. The tests were run on both a Pi3 and a Pi4, but both showed the same thing!
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on August 24, 2019, 02:10:03 PM
...., you can test read/write speeds of drives using dd (https://www.shellhacks.com/disk-speed-test-read-write-hdd-ssd-perfomance-linux/) (sorry, Harry!). Remember to do the testing on the Pi as we don't know what corners they cut to make it small and cheap.
I did this and got 12.8 mb/s read speed and 7.8 mb/s write speed. I would have thought the SD card is about the same.
Quote from: fox on August 25, 2019, 08:27:25 AM
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on August 24, 2019, 02:10:03 PM
Just like with SD cards, thumb drives can vary quite a bit in performance.
....
I just found an article (here (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-ssd-test,39811.html)) that not only verifies what you said, but actually shows that booting and opening files can be much slower when the OS is run from a usb3 drive than when it is run from an SD card. The tests were run on both a Pi3 and a Pi4, but both showed the same thing!
Interesting. I did some testing using dd between the microSD card and one USB 2 drive. I'm going to try a few more drives and then publish the results in the forums in the next few days.