Enlarge / Two cheapo Intel mini PCs, a Raspberry Pi 5, and an Xbox controller for scale. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I recently tried to use a Raspberry Pi 5 as a regular desktop PC . The experiment wasn't a failure—I was able to use a Pi to get most of my work done for a few days. But the device's performance, and especially the relative immaturity of the Linux's Arm software ecosystem, meant that there were lots of incompatibilities and rough edges.

One of the problems with trying to use a Pi 5 as a regular desktop computer is that, by the time you've paid for the 8GB version of the board, a decent active cooler and case, and (ideally) some kind of M.2 storage attachment and SSD, you've spent close to a couple of hundred dollars on the system. That's not a ton of money to spend on a desktop PC, but it is enough that the Pi no longer feels miraculously cheap, and there are actually other, more flexible competitors worth considering.

Consider the selection of sub-$200 mini desktop PCs that litter the online storefronts of Amazon and AliExpress. Though you do need to roll the dice on low-to-no-name brands like Beelink, GMKTec, Firebat, BMax, Trigkey, or Bosgame, it's actually possible to buy a reasonably capable desktop system with 8GB to 16GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB of storage, a Windows 11 license, and a workaday x86-based Intel CPU for as little as $107, though Amazon pricing usually runs closer to $170.

• 

  The controversial Pi update just adds Microsoft's VS Code repo in a separate file in sources.list.d. No actual packages were installed. [credit: Jim Salter ]

We were recently alerted to something of a tempest in a teapot: when the Raspberry Pi Foundation made it easier to install Microsoft's Visual Studio Code development environment, some Linux users mistook it for a sort of Mark of the Beast, with concerns being raised about telemetry and "what Microsoft repo secretly installed without your knowledge."

It's true that an update recently pushed to Raspberry Pi OS added a Microsoft repo to Raspberry Pi OS systems—but it's not true that it added any actual packages whatsoever.

Investigating the changes

Just to the left of the 40-pin GPIO header, you can see the Pi 400's SD card slot. Want to play with two different distros without the hassle of uninstalling and reinstalling when you switch? Just use two different SD cards! (credit: Jim Salter)

Luckily, my own Raspberry Pi 400 was running Ubuntu, not Raspberry Pi OS, which made it easy to switch back and see what changes occurred in the system. Equally luckily, the Raspberry Pi 400 is almost ideally suited to distro-hopping—all I needed to do to get a pre-update version of Pi OS running was to power my Pi off, swap SD cards from the Ubuntu card I had been using to my old Pi OS card, and then fire it back up. Presto, a pre-update Pi!

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Interested in keeping up with the Vulkan driver development on the Raspberry Pi 4? We have a new update for you and an upcoming event you might want to watch.

While the v3dv driver is now part of Mesa and was released along with Mesa 20.3.0 back in December 2020, work has not stopped on it. There was still plenty of areas it could improve upon from features to performance, with developer Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias writing on their blog about recent work.

Some of what's new includes:

• The following optional 1.0 features were enabled: logicOp, althaToOne, independentBlend, drawIndirectFirstInstance, and shaderStorageImageExtendedFormats.
• Added support for timestamp queries.
• Added implementation for VK_KHR_maintenance1, VK_EXT_private_data, and VK_KHR_display extensions
• Added support for Wayland WSI.

Interestingly it seems more developers are getting involved, as multiple features were hooked up by people not involved in the "core" team of the driver. Now it's in Mesa directly, anyone can get involved.

The driver itself became a conformant Vulkan driver last year but they still had more testing to do to find bugs. As part of this the Order Independent Transparency demo from Sascha Willems is now working too (see Willem's Vulkan stuff here ):

Additionally the FOSDEM 21 event in this weekend and they will be doing a talk on Saturday February 6  at 3PM UTC. The talk will cover the development story and current status of the driver, along with an overview of the design and the challenges of doing it.

The Raspberry Pi sure is a versatile device and thanks to GameMaker Studio 2 from YoYo Games , it might even end up as more of a gaming unit with newly added support for exported games.

In the version 2.3.1.542 release of GameMaker Studio 2 that went live on December 16 ( details ), it mentioned in the release notes how it now supports "Ubuntu ARMv7" as an output type for their editor. We discovered this thanks to the developer of Shield Cat mentioning on their Patreon post how they've been updating their game to hit higher performance on the Raspberry Pi.

Curious about more details on this, we reached out to YoYo Games to clarify some details of this new feature. Their CTO, Russell Kay, mentioned this in reply to why they started supporting Linux ARM devices:

We are big fans of the Raspberry Pi and have been looking to support the device in a cost effective way with the release of the OpenGL driver and the higher power (CPU and GPU). It became viable for us to release and support the Raspberry Pi target, since it was generic we expanded it to include devices that support the armeabihf architecture, assuming the device has the correct libraries that we require, but our primary target is the Raspberry Pi running raspbian.

With that all now in place they said this in reply to future upgrades to their Linux support in GameMaker Studio 2:

We will improve our Linux offering over future versions, but we are not able to announce specific changes at this stage.

Game Maker Studio powers some really popular games, and it continues to be a very popular game engine for indie developers. Released titles like Hyper Light Drifter, Minit, The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED], The Swords of Ditto, Stoneshard, Nuclear Throne and a great many more were all built with it.

Will be fun to see if many developers decide to put out more Linux builds of their games when using GMS2, both on the desktop and for the fantastic Raspberry Pi device family.

Time to warm up your little board as the Raspberry Pi OS has a big new releasing up for those of you sticking with the official Debian Linux based system. Sounds like it's a pretty huge update with a lot of work that went into it, which is great as the Raspberry Pi is a wonderful device for all sorts of uses (and yes gaming too!).

For starters, this finally brings with it a major update to Chromium with version 84. They mentioned it took longer than they wanted but getting video hardware acceleration integrated takes a lot of work. Thanks to that you should see smooth video playback in browser and they've also paid special attention to the likes of Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom due to the pandemic. This is the last release they support Flash with too.

One big background change is their move to the PulseAudio sound server. Since Linux audio can be a little…complicated, PulseAudio deals with most of the interfaces available and puts it under one roof. Most normal distributions use it by default and so with this change Bluetooth audio on the Raspberry Pi OS should now be easier too. They're also automating some of the Bluetooth stuff to make it simpler for users.

They're also now including Printing support out of the box, along with CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) and the system-config-printer UI to make it a smoother experience.

On top of all that they've improved accessibility support with the Orca screen reader, there's new system options to deal with units that have an LED like the Raspberry Pi Zero or the new Raspberry Pi 400 as well. If you missed it, they also recently announced a cheap and cheerful Raspberry Pi 4 Case Fan for $5 and the system settings have been updated in this new OS release so you can configure it.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Really nice to see the RPi team expand all areas of the system, as it's become a much more general-purpose unit for computing considering the amount of power it has now for the still very low cost.

Let us know in the comments what distribution you're using if you have a Raspberry Pi and what you've been doing with it. I am tempted to hop on over to Ubuntu, now it's officially supported .

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

While users who want a properly stable base to game with should probably stick to Ubuntu 20.04 which is the long-term support release, the Ubuntu 20.10 'Groovy Gorilla' update is out today.

For a while there has been a few special Ubuntu flavours that have offered images to install on the Raspberry Pi like Ubuntu MATE, however, that's now becoming official directly within Ubuntu as of the 20.10 release. This is actually awesome, as Ubuntu is one of the easiest Linux distributions to get going with.

From the press release:

“In this release, we celebrate the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s commitment to put open computing in the hands of people all over the world,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical. “We are honoured to support that initiative by optimising Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi, whether for personal use, educational purposes or as a foundation for their next business venture.”

“From the classic Raspberry Pi board to the industrial grade Compute Module, this first step to an Ubuntu LTS on Raspberry Pi with long term support and security updates matches our commitment to widen access to the very best computing and open source capabilities” said Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading.

If you do want to learn more about it, Martin Wimpress the Desktop Engineering Director and Rhys Davies, Raspberry Pi Product Manager will be live in a YouTube video. You can watch it here below on October 23rd, 5PM BST / 4PM UTC:

Watch video on YouTube.com

As for the rest of the Ubuntu 20.10 release, we're of course most interested in the normal desktop Linux variety. The Ubuntu 20.10 release comes with GNOME 3.38 from September and all then advancements that came with that like an improved applications grid, better multi-monitor support, QR codes to give other devices access to your WiFI easily, battery percentage display toggle has been exposed in power settings and more. It's quite a big refresh that continues seeing GNOME get smoother each release.

On top of that, Ubuntu 20.10 will also be certified on more devices overall. Canonical stated that more Ubuntu workstations now receive biometric identification support out of the box, 2-in-1 devices with on-screen keyboards are now fully supported enabling an improved Ubuntu experience on devices including the Dell XPS 2-in-1 and Lenovo Yoga.

You can download from Ubuntu.com . The special Ubuntu version for the RPi will be available here .

Voitures, vélos, scooters... : la mobilité de demain se lit sur Vroom ! https://www.numerama.com/vroom/vroom//

L'article Le Raspberry Pi 4 est disponible à 71 euros dans un pack complet pour Prime Day est apparu en premier sur Numerama .

Bien connu des hackers en herbes et des passionnés de programmation, le mini-ordinateur Raspberry Pi a annoncé sur son site officiel qu’il intégrerait désormais une prise en charge complète par GNU/Linux Fedora. Le système d’exploitation imaginé par la division de Red Hat et IBM spécialement dédié à l’Internet of Things a ainsi été officiellement présenté sous le patronyme de Fedora IoT, et devrait permettre à l’ordinateur de poursuivre son développement, notamment dans le secteur professionnel, mais aussi pourquoi pas, dans la domotique et le prototypage d’objets connectés.

C’est sur son blog officiel que le constructeur Red Hat a annoncé officiellement la nouvelle, promettant ainsi un support officiel pour les appareils basse consommation dotés de processeur ARM ou x86, comme c’est le cas des Raspberry Pi, mais aussi des Pine64 par exemple. Accessible depuis aujourd’hui, Fedora IoT comprend aussi le nouvel outil open source Platform AbstRaction for SECurity (PARSEC) visant à fournir une API commune pour la sécurité matérielle et cryptographique indépendamment du matériel utilisé. Actuellement disponible dans sa version bêta uniquement, Fedora IoT a été annoncé en parallèle de Fedora 33, lui aussi en version bêta, qui s’appuie sur un noyau Linux 5.8 et un bureau GNOME 3.38. Ce nouveau système d’exploitation destiné principalement aux ordinateurs portables et de bureau intégrera ainsi de nombreuses nouveautés, a d’ores et déjà promis Red Hat. En résumé : la prise en charge de versions mises à jour des langages Ruby, Python et Perl, ainsi que l’arrivée de l’éditeur de texte par défaut nano, qui pourra toujours être remplacé par vim ou emacs pour les utilisateurs qui le souhaitent.

Promo

295 Commentaires

TICTID Raspberry Pi 4 Modèle...

• 【Raspberry Pi 4 Modèle B avec 4 Go de RAM】Raspberry Pi 4 modèle B avec processeur...
• 【Sortie Double Ecran】Vous pouvez exécuter deux moniteurs simultanément en 4K!...
• 【Carte MicroSD Authentique】Pré-chargée avec NOOBS, la carte MicroSD 32 Go ClassGB prend...
• 【Ventilateur Obligatoire】Doté de 3 radiateurs en cuivre Premium de qualité supérieure et...

149,99 EUR −54,00 EUR 95,99 EUR

Vérifier le prix

Journal du Geek