Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer Perhaps hoping to mark independence from x86 PCs, there's a new July 4th release of the official Raspberry Pi OS, although it remains coy of giving a version number. The Raspberry Pi OS 2024-07-04 release appeared on the USA's version of what is arguably the world's most widely celebrated holiday: independence from the UK, as …
I used to use the Pi Debian (x86-32bit) release for an old Dell Mini 9 PC (Atom N270, single core, 1GB RAM) and it worked fine (when the default installed XP shuffled off to its grave).
I would love to use a 64bit version for my now aged Nehalem Core i7 when Win 10 is no longer supported by Microsoft as it cannot be upgraded to Win 11 (not should it be). Discovered Bottles to run Wine and it runs some essential Windows software (e.g. GOG Galaxy, Amazon Music HD applications), so running Windows as an OS becomes even less important.
[Author here]
From some experimentation, it seems that if you boot the Pi Desktop on a 32-bit PC, it works fine and installs a 32-bit kernel, but if you install it on a 64-bit machine, you get the exact same 32-bit userland but a 64-bit kernel.
I've not seen any other distro do this but it works well. On a ~15YO Core 2 Duo Thinkpad X200 maxed out with 8GB of RAM, the OS can see and use all 8GB just fine.
In theory it should have the side-effect that no app can allocate more than 3GB of RAM, which the Electron fans and amateur photoshop fiends or wannabe video editors will whinge about but suits me fine.
Debian 11 is approaching EOL:
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2024/05/22/debian-11-approaching-eol/
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
... But for now it works fine.
> the OS can see and use all 8GB just fine.
It might just be the 32-bit PAE kernel.
I think mainly Windows spread the rumor that 32-bit kernels could only ever handle with up to 4GB of Ram. When in reality, individual processes each getting up to 4GB of ram was actually very servicable. On OpenBSD, my ulimits intentionally restrict processes to 1GB.
[Author here]
> It might just be the 32-bit PAE kernel.
*Sigh* No, it is not. Just for a laugh, please give me the benefit of the doubt? I am typing on my geriatric Thinkpad X200, booted just now, just for you. It is, as I said, running a 64-bit kernel, freshly updated:
````
lproven@thinkpad-x61:~$ uname -a
Linux thinkpad-x61 5.10.0-30-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.218-1 (2024-06-01) x86_64 GNU/Linux
lproven@thinkpad-x61:~$ date
Tue 9 Jul 15:49:08 BST 2024
lproven@thinkpad-x61:~$ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="11"
VERSION="11 (bullseye)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bullseye
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"
lproven@thinkpad-x61:~$
````
(Note: hostname is misleading, because this HDD was transplanted from an even older machine.)
The browser, however, is Chromium x86-32:
Version 120.0.6099.224 (Official Build) built on Debian 11.8, running on Debian 11.10 (32-bit)
The Reg FOSS desk, still tanned from a month in Central Europe, wrote this sat in the dull grey Isle of Man, where as he gazes glumly out the rain-streaked window, it can only be deduced that there is a sun because there's some non-localised glow coming from the circa 30 metre cloudbase.
Yeah, I know.
> I'm in the USA, under what we used to call a "heat wave" and now call "summer". Trade?
TBPH while we are planning to relocate back to Czechia in the next year or so, it was ~35 deg C on the hottest day out there last month, when I was at a BBQ for a friend's kid's 5th birthday party, here:
https://www.rodicemvbrne.cz/venkovni-aktivity/lisenska-rokle/
It was unpleasantly warm, and I have experienced just a fraction of 1C under 40 deg C in Prague before. Given that most homes don't have air conditioning there, that was brutal.
I'm considering keeping a small toehold here so we can return if rapid global warming makes summertimes there intolerable. They are already experiencing forest fires in the summer.
In Germany, near Berlin, hanging around on an ancient airport field (pre 1900, I believe!) with a bunch of other paragliders waiting for my turn.
Too bloody hot - even the thermals wouldn't go up. Forecast was 32C but I think it was warmer.
(edit: but the beer is no longer in the fridge!)
The UK really needed that wet winter/spring as its reservoirs and groundwater were parched. Thank your lucky stars it was damp.
And hardly anyone in the UK has aircon. Unless someone can come up with a unit so tiny it fits in UK properties, which were never designed to have the wall space for one, we are all going to expire in our homes a few summers down the line.
Given the date of the election, 4th July was independence day here too.
As for the Pi - get a retail Pi PC out there. Open the box and go. That would give the mainstream some independence in tech too.
> Unless someone can come up with a unit so tiny it fits in UK properties
They make air conditioners where all that goes in the window is a closely fitted panel with air intake and exhaust ports, and all the cooling hardware goes in a separate standalone unit that sits on the floor, with hoses connecting them. They have their problems too (they're bulky, so in a sense you've just moved your space problem from the window to the room interior), but they work and can be used with all but the tiniest windows.
We try, but getting upstream to accept ANYTHING takes months and months and months and months and months. It's a massive burden to fix every little niggle demanded by upstream when you have many more important things to do. And some code will also never be accepted upstream because of reasons.
That said, the vast majority of code is upstreamed now. Just a few custom bits and pieces to make everything work. Mostly now using Linux API (Mesa, DRM/KMS, libcamera etc) so the firmware is now very small and only needed for a few things like boot and temperature control.
But out of interest, why would you prefer official spins over what is mostly Debian with just a few tweaks anyway?
But out of interest, why would you prefer official spins over what is mostly Debian with just a few tweaks anyway?
My main reason for thinking that more distro choice for the Pi would be nice is because my other computers all run Redhat Fedora Linux and have ever since they introduced the 'dnf' update/upgrade utility, so I'd like to be able to use 'dnf' on my PI's too.
Apart from that, I much prefer RedHat's 'dnf' installer to Debian's 'apt' equivalent: its updating progres display is a lot tidier that 'apt's and I find that this makes the infrequent update trouble shooting easier: the rk_hunter tool, which spots rootkit nastiness is very nice to have too.
.
[Author here]
> its updating progres display is a lot tidier that 'apt's and I find that this makes the infrequent update trouble shooting easier:
Then if you are forced to use Debian or a derivative, install Nala. It gives you that on an Apt basis.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/13/zinc_ubuntu_remix/
You sound like you are part of the OS development team. So I'll take my chance to say why I don't use Pi OS on my Pi4 despite it having so much to go for (for which congratulations, offering so much with so few memory usage is a great achievement).
The issue I have is that the readability of text in both Firefox as well as Chromium is really bad to me. It strains my eyes so much it quickly gives me a head ache. Changing fonts in the browser nor changing fonts in the display manager not installing new fonts recommended for readability and changing them nor enabling or disabling graphic hardware acceleration works. Maybe it's the choice of display viewer that causes it. Anyway, after searching the internet and trying out some options to no avail, I gave up after a few hours of tinkering and installed Ubuntu and the problem vanished. I'd still prefer the lower memory usage and higher responsiveness of Pi OS as well as the better integration of maker tools.
It's not an attempt to ditch at the Raspberry Pi team at all, I like Raspberry Pi. It's just my pragmatic solution to only spend so much time trying to solve what is for me a breaking point. Head aches are no fun. I'd be more then happy with a simple description on the Raspberry forum how to solve that problem since apparently too few people experience the problem to alter (and possibly make less lightweight) things for everybody.
"But out of interest, why would you prefer official spins over what is mostly Debian with just a few tweaks anyway?"
I think you answered this yourself:
"And some code will also never be accepted upstream because of reasons."
If you can't convince the upstream owners to take your code (and they are experts in the areas), why should anyone else want to run it? It doesn't take other manufacturers months to get code into upstream, so there is clearly something not right somewhere...
"But out of interest, why would you prefer official spins over what is mostly Debian with just a few tweaks anyway?"
I know this is probably an edge case, but while I daily my Raspberry Pi 5 I'm usually signed in remotely. Under x11, I was happy enough using VNC. The introduction of Wayland prevented establishing a VNC connection without the user already logged into the device, under Pi OS. I could drop to x11, which I did for a while, but given Gnome (and, thus, Ubuntu) allows remote login under Wayland and (helpfully) via Remote Desktop, I've switched to Ubuntu for now. I gather KDE has just added this remote login ability, too.
Also, out of the box, Ubuntu locks the device with Win+L. A trivial thing which I'm sure I could make Pi OS do, but it just works in Ubuntu.
And this is where someone tells me "why not install Gnome on Pi OS?" and I reply "Well, yeah... I didn't think about that until I wrote this comment."
[Author here]
> I would far prefer to have an official spin of Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora for ARM that runs on Raspberry Pi...
Certainly, sir. What size would you like?
Debian:
https://raspi.debian.net/
Ubuntu:
https://ubuntu.com/raspberry-pi
Fedora:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/raspberry-pi/
openSUSE:
https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi4
(Other models supported too; I tested on a Pi 3B+ and documented it in the SLE manuals.)
Umm, what's a compositor, and why would I need one?
I realise I am starting to sound like Mel Smith in the HiFi Shop Sketch from "Not the Nine O'Clock News" all those years ago!
>> 110 in the shade
> Good hypthetical gods. I daresay most of my computers wouldn't function at all, which wouldn't matter, because neither would I. I'd not merely be dead, in fairly short order I'd be cooked.
I assume he means 110 F, or 43 C. Over 108F/42C has been common in the western US this week.
I served a summer in an office being overhauled, long weeks over 100F 38C. It IS brutal; in fact you can't maintain normal body temperature when the air is warmer than your biological thermostat, except by copious evaporation. I'd leave when I felt faint. Carla (one tough woman) and I walked-out after a month.
The computers mostly stood it better than I did. Some ran high fan 22 hours a day but were tolerable temps for a 2 month run. We had net-switches which were designed for a small tin hut in the American desert, fans like turbojets. I'd hacked the fans back to part-speed for normal days, but that summer I just put it back to stock.
And yeah, that's not what most of the world calls "cooked", though it might do for "well done" in Texas.
As this is El Reg, I'll use the opportunity to nit pick on something irrelevant to the main point.
The Raspberry Pi OS 2024-07-04 release appeared on the USA's version of what is arguably the world's most widely celebrated holiday: independence from the UK, as celebrated in 65 countries around the world.
Er, no. If you follow the links back to the original source, it's based on a story about which countries are now independent from the UK, not which countries celebrate a day of independence. There's no "independence day" holiday in Canada, and I don't think there is one in Australia or New Zealand either (I can't speak with respect to other former colonies).
You won't even get agreement in Canada as to when we became independent, just a range of different opinions, depending on how you want to define "independence". The most common event given is the passing of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which also covered Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and Newfoundland (which was not part of Canada at the time). Some people would say 1982 (patriation of the constitution), and some people would say that there's no specific date, just a gradual process over the first half of the 20th century which took place without anyone actually intending it to.
"Independence day" holidays are for dodgy third world countries.
This was a nice article though, and it prodded me out of my inertia to run upgrades on my Pis (3, 4, and 5).
Categorically not in NZ or Oz. NZ has Waitangi day, the anniversary of the the Maori tribes signing a treaty with the Crown on 6 Feb 1840 (an uncommon event for the British Empire, but the Maori were such hard nuts they been unable to simply trample them underfoot as was usual). The treaty has been both the cause and solution for most problems in NZ ever since; often simultaneously for the same person.
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