Category: Raspberry Pi

another reason for using the mbp

whbeebe

I’ve rattled on in the past about going in all Apple, including, and especially, the Macbook Pro Retina. While some of the solutions I’ve developed over the past few months have seemed Rube-Goldbergish (especially using a Linux VM to manipulate a microSDHC card for the Raspberry Pi 3), the fact I keep coming back to the Mac and OS X is a testament to how it all works together for me. After getting the VM to work the Ubuntu notebook is sitting quietly in its bag in the closet, with the bag gathering dust. That’s a complete turnaround from a post of nearly two years ago when I declared Ubuntu 14 the best Linux distribution, and as an OS, as good as any other, including OS X. A lot has changed for me in two years.

Biggest driver for me is overall quality. The physical machine, with its 16GB of RAM, 1TB HDD, and Retina display, matches with OS X. It invites me to want to work with it, far more so than either the Ubuntu notebook and the Windows notebook. I should point out that both notebooks were manufactured by Samsung. Everything about the MBP works smoothly and quickly. Not so much with Linux or Windows, especially Windows. The more I grow away from Windows 10, the less I remember past actions with fondness. I just don’t like the jarring manner that Microsoft moved from Windows 8 to Windows 10. OS X seems refined; Windows 10 seems slapdash and at certain points just ugly. Ubuntu 15.10 seems to hew more to the OS X philosophy of look and feel, and thus is easier for me to work with. Even the CentOS 7 VM (CentOS 7 being a rebuild of Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 without Redhat’s intellectual property) feels better to work with than Windows 10. And part of that is due to it executing on the MBP hardware.

I keep thinking Apple is going to do something outrageous that will drive me away from OS X specifically, but I don’t think that’s going to happen, at least not anytime soon. Rather than loose sleep worrying about what might happen, I’ll continue to enjoy what I have. Enjoyment of tools like the MBP and OS X is the secret sauce to high productivity. When you enjoy what you’re doing with what you’re using you just don’t want to stop.

using twm as a desktop environment on the raspberry pi 3

whbeebe

I chose TWM because it’s the simplest desktop environment and has one of the smallest footprints if not the smallest. On a machine such as the Raspberry Pi 3 with its fixed memory size of 1GB (which is hard-wired into the card and can’t be upgraded, not even with a plugin extension), what the RP3 (and all its predecessors) required of their human programmers was an understanding of its limitations helping to choose the best applications to run on the card. Ever since I bought and powered up the first generation, I’ve always sought software that demanded as little resources as possible, especially memory. TWM, of all the DEs I’m familiar with, demands the smallest memory footprint of all. The screen shot above, the one I used in an earlier post, ran overnight for 14 hours, with the three xterms on the desktop, and top (or htop in this instance) running in one of the windows.

Looking at the upper left corner of the htop terminal, you’ll note that only a fraction of the .9GB (out of 1GBl; remember that part of this is shared and used by the GPU). You should also note that swap hasn’t been touched. In all other distributions and versions I’ve used in the past, some sort of cron job would kick off or the DE would make much more demands of the memory. To be honest I’m not sure that swap is enabled here; after looking at the screen capture I need to go check that. Regardless, the memory footprint of the OS and DE are quite small after 14 hours, something for an embedded computer I’m quite appreciative off.

And this brings up a final point. Eventually I want to tuck this computer into a corner somewhere and not worry about it. Not forget about it, but get it to the point where I don’t have to worry that it’s run out of memory and swap and locked up horribly. I can reach that goal with a custom executive or other non-Linux runtime, but that costs hard cash up front as well as on-going royalties. That’s not a problem if you’re creating a commercial product in which a computer is just an out-of-sight appliance. But for someone such as myself, with no resources, I need to carefully choreograph all of this to create something that I could sell with a clear conscious. I also want to point out that this is not a general purpose computer that would require something like Raspian, that might run Libre Office (and a lot of other applications that are in that distributions). TWM is little more than a light-weight xterm manager, if you will. I could not even install all the X packages to support TWM and just live within the seven virtual logins provided by the ALT function keys, something I did for a number of years when Linux was first released. The DE for my use is thus a means to an end, not an end unto itself, and it doesn’t need all the fancy features that all other contemporary DEs have accumulated over the years. TWM is just fine for my purposes.