Path: ...!3.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!reader5.news.weretis.net!news.solani.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Raspberry Pi5 versus other cheap Intel based boxes for general
 computing
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:35:48 GMT
Message-ID: <uujt0l$37sr$1@solani.org>
References: <uuip0m$2sb2$1@solani.org> <uuj77i$3r4ca$1@dont-email.me> <uujan1$35er$1@solani.org> <uujpu5$3vsfl$1@dont-email.me>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; ISO-8859-15
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2024 15:35:49 -0000 (UTC)
Injection-Info: solani.org;
	logging-data="106395"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@news.solani.org"
User-Agent: NewsFleX-1.5.7.5 (Linux-5.15.32-v7l+)
Cancel-Lock: sha1:JSF+23o999IKtQ9ddFdNcyCdrTA=
X-User-ID: eJwNy8ERACEIBLCWXGThKEc46L8E/WYm3AYrV6MphyMVqtiZj07kH20dCy7TXkn0rK75MriEMngJFPPALuXJC1EvFTg=
X-Newsreader-location: NewsFleX-1.5.7.5 (c) 'LIGHTSPEED' off line news reader for the Linux platform
 NewsFleX homepage: http://www.panteltje.nl/panteltje/newsflex/ and ftp download ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/linux/system/news/readers/ 
Bytes: 6930
Lines: 110

On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Apr 2024 15:43:14 +0100) it happened Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <uujpu5$3vsfl$1@dont-email.me>:

>On 03/04/2024 11:23, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100) it happened Martin Brown
>> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <uuj77i$3r4ca$1@dont-email.me>:
>> 
>>> In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
>>> comes with it.
>> 
>> Yes, that was nice too.
>> Linux has Octave too for math, some more.
>
>I generally use Maxima and most recently Julia for its arbitrary 
>precision mathematics, but there are few things that they can't do.
>
>>> I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
>>> i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).
>> 
>> My laptop now > 10 years old now runs Ubuntu.
>> At least everything works, put a Huawei 4 G stick in it and internet all over Europe.
>> This Raspberry  has the Huawei 4 G stick in it now so I am online in a flash with one click
>> and offline after that with one click so no hacking and a dynamic IP address to make hacking even more problematic.
>> 
>> Did you have a P4 before the Pi5? If so what's the main difference in experience?
>
>I had an original Raspberry Pi way back with composite video out but 
>never really found something it could do well enough to be interesting. 
>I found cheaper STM32 development boards more to my liking. YMMV
>
>The Pi5 is quite a big step up from there! Even came with working GCC 
>compiler configured in the standard distribution which was nice.
>
>>> I was tempted by an N100 based toy PC at Xmas but managed to resist.
>> 
>> Yea, we will see were it goes...
>
>N100 looks quite capable. My only concern is the whiny fans on these 
>very small enclosures. Fan noise increases rapidly with rpm and tiny 
>fans don't move much air. SFF is as small as I like to go.
>
>> My 20 year old PC upstairs still runs xfree and the old audio system (before Alsa), and works still perfectly with my
>> satellite stuff.
>> Is an AMD 486.
>
>I haven't got much left that is quite that old. One machine from 2003 
>that is kept mainly because it has a real parallel port needed for some 
>bitbanging programmers that I still very occasionally need to use.
>
>My spellchequer today wants to turn you into Panatella must be all the 
>food over the Easter Holidays that's affecting it!

Yes spellshakers are great!
I moved ispell from UK English to US English a while back, caused fewer problems on Usenet.
My oldest Raspi runs a Linux from Feb 2013 says uname -a
Bought it 07-03-2013, been running 24/7 since then.
Think I once changed SDcard..
All Raspi SDcards are backuped to magnetic media, some to Blu-ray optical disc.

From dvd-list.txt that now lists the contents of 1000 optical disks I keep in a big alu box:
 https://panteltje.nl/pub/CD_box_binnenkant_IXIMG_0549.JPG
disk 927
BD-R-25
Platinum 4x inkjet printable
LG BH10LS38
ext2 filesystem
Raspberry debian 8 GB SDcard image with librtlsdr, xforms, fftw3, xpsa, dump1090
Risc OS image
Original debian image
Method:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000000000 count=25 > bluray.iso
mke2fs  bluray.iso
mount -o loop=/dev/loop0 bluray.iso  /mnt/loop
cp ... /mnt/loop/
# stay below about 22.3 GB
du /mnt/loop
umount /dev/loop0
growisofs -speed=4 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=bluray.iso
# l /mnt/loop
total 13882600
drwx------ 2 root root      16384 Feb  2 17:55 lost+found/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1939865600 Feb  9 04:44 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     159063 Mar  6 13:56 Raspberry-Pi-R2.0-Schematics-Issue2.2_027.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     109401 Mar  6 13:59 RPi_Low-level_peripherals.html
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root       4096 Mar  6 13:59 RPi_Low-level_peripherals_files/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     229735 Mar  6 14:01 bcm2835-1.22.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  102683388 Mar  8 15:27 riscos-2012-11-01-RC6.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root         42 Mar  8 15:30 sha1sum_riscos-2012-11-01-RC6.zip.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root         42 Mar 10 13:26 sha1_sum_rasbian_zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root         41 Mar 10 13:41 sha1sum_2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root       1590 Mar 10 16:17 how_to_raspberry.txt~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root       1590 Mar 10 16:17 how_to_raspberry.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8193572864 Mar 10 17:16 raspberry_with_rtlsdr_xpsa.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3965190144 Mar 10 17:36 media_4GB_sdcard.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root         41 Mar 10 17:38 sha1sum_raspberry_with_rtlsdr_xpsa.img.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root         41 Mar 10 17:39 sha1sum_media_4GB_sdcard.img

I do not trust SSDs that much, harddisks seem to last forever unless you drop those (I did once and lost code and music I wrote).
The CD box goes down in time to the first burnable CDs..
If you keep the CDs you burned in the dark they last a very long time, decennia, like with
cameras, exposure time * light intensity .. burn a CD and set it in the sun on a bookshelf and it has read errors in a few hours.
But with TB harddisks the size of a soap box .. 

This about 4 TB harddisk is connected to the Pi 4 8 GB I am posting this with:
/dev/sda2      3844510712 2677846596 971303452  74% /mnt/sda2
/dev/sda2 on /mnt/sda2 type ext4 (rw,relatime)
Many of the other stuff here is on reiserfs, hope they are not so stupid (Linux) to drop support for that,
may as well drop Linux and write my own OS then.
Did write a multitasker for Z80 once...
I try to avoid OSes as much as possible, often no filesystem is needed at all to control stuff like with micro controllers.