Tag: 3366ff

ubuntu 23.10 on a raspberry pi 5 with 8gb

whbeebe
Ubuntu 23.10 desktop on a Raspberry Pi 5 w/8GB

Update 4 March 2024 — Ubuntu 23.10 is finally fixed

As noted in a link at the bottom, Ubuntu 23.10 finally supports the SPI devices on a Raspberry Pi 5, meaning that all hardware I need supported (I2C, SPI, GPIO) appears to be fully functional when running Ubuntu 23.10 with all the latest OS and kernel updates. There is absolutely no need to install Raspberry Pi OS, formerly known as Raspbian, on the Raspberry Pi 5.

Update 9 January 2024 — That Didn’t Last Very Long, Did It?

I am flopping back to Ubuntu after having flipped back to Raspberry Pi OS. I just could not stand the loss of power and convenience I experienced with Ubuntu, but not with Raspberry Pi OS. They should rename Raspberry Pi OS to Raspberry Pi Mess.

Update 7 January 2024

I have decided, for the second time (the first being back in 2018 with Ubuntu 20.10, see link below) to move back to Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspian) because the SPI subsystem isn’t installed/doesn’t work. I’ve tried everything I know, including slumming through the various fora and as well as searching on the web to find a solution to make it all work. It won’t. So as of right now I’m back on Raspberry Pi OS so I can get back to the reason I purchased my Raspberry Pi 5 board, interfacing with external hardware.

I put this in because of the insane number of hits on this post over the last few days. So be warned. Ubuntu 23.10 is very pretty and very nice as an OS, especially compared to the current Raspberry Pi OS, but it’s still missing critical support for some key Raspberry Pi 5 hardware subsystems. It’s a shame, really. I would have loved to stay on Ubuntu.

Original Post

After receiving two copies of the latest Raspberry Pi 5, I finally installed two different operating systems on 128GB SanDisk micro SDXC cards and booted up one of the SBCs.

The first OS i tried was the recommended Raspberry Pi OS built from Debian 12 for 64-bit ARM. I used the basic desktop. Once it booted up on the RPi 5, it ran quite well. Compared to how it runs on the RPi 4, execution of the operating system was highly performant, and all actions such as starting an application or moving or resizing windows was absolutely smooth with no discernible lag whatsoever.

The problem was trying to do any work with that operating system. As has been noted and warned about in other stories, not everything has been fully updated on Raspberry Pi OS for the RPi 5. I ran into one such problem when I tried to perform a screen shot with the utility scrot. I’ve used it before on older versions of the operating system without any issues. This time scrot simply created a black image when it was run. There were some other issues, but that wasn’t the real reason I left it. No, Raspberry Pi OS is still the limited environment it’s always been going back to the Raspberry Pi 3. I’m spoiled for choice these days, and all the other Linux distributions are polished and provide a solid user experience. Raspberry Pi OS is falling behind in that department.

The second operating system I tried, and the one I’m writing this review on, is Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 for Raspberry Pi 5. It is as easy to download and copy to another SDXC card. It booted up almost instantly, even the first time. Once up and running it looked and felt like an Ubuntu installation on every other personal computer I have it installed on, and that’s a significant advance for this distribution. Every other time I’ve tried to install and run Ubuntu, it’s been so slow that I had it off my Raspberry Pi 4s within 15 minutes. This time, it’s on to stay.

There is one odd feature of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi 5. I have the official active cooler in place, and it has a tiny fan in it. Under Raspberry Pi OS it would occasionally turn on while I was using the desktop. Under Ubuntu 23.10 it’s on all the time and running at full RPMs. While it’s loud enough that I can hear it from where I sit, it’s not too loud, more like background white noise, but noticeable. I would note that the CPU temperatures have been in the upper thirty degree centigrade range with Ubuntu. Under Raspberry Pi OS the CPU temperatures where 20° C higher. The choice in this case is I can compute in near-silence with Raspberry Pi OS or run a lot cooler, but a bit louder, with Ubuntu.

I might give Fedora 39 a quick test to see how it works, but if I don’t, running Ubuntu 23.10 is an excellent user experience on the Raspberry Pi 5.

Links

moving back to raspberry pi os on the raspberry pi 5

ubuntu 23.10 finally supports spi on the raspberry pi 5

fedora 39 vs rhel 9.3 — fedora, part 2

whbeebe

This is the second of two parts where I very casually compare and contrast Fedora 39 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.3.

When we left off I’d installed RHEL 9.2 in a qemu virtual machine. I’d done a very minimalist setup just to get a feel for how a stock RHEL installation looked and felt in operation. In order to install a legal copy of RHEL I had to register as a Red Hat developer, then register my RHEL running instance under my developer account. In the process of updating RHEL, my installation was updated to RHEL 9.3. Now we’re looking at Fedora 39.

I should note up front this isn’t Fedora Gnome. This is the Fedora Cinnamon spin. I did install Fedora Gnome first, checked out if it still had the parental control application installed, which it does. I hate some other group basically calling the shots on my machine with regards to their moral view of the world. It’s been many, many years since my adult children were living at home, and back then they ran Windows computers because Linux was just too primitive to put in front of anyone other than an adult. Now we have a group of do-gooders in the Fedora community who have decided you will run parental controls whether you need to or not, and that you cannot disable nor remove that application without crippling the graphical desktop. My response to that bullshit is “Fuck you, nobody died and made you my moral conscience.” To paraphrase the New Hampshire motto “Live Free or Die,” for me it’s “Compute Free or Die.”

As it turns out this is a “feature” of the Gnome desktop, which is just one more reason to not ever use it unless required to with RHEL. At least RHEL doesn’t have this silly bullshit in its distribution. Instead I installed the Fedora Cinnamon spin with its Cinnamon desktop. Let me state up front it’s not a prefectly pure Cinnamon desktop, but for practical purposes it’s good enough (another motto, “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough.”) Once installed I then installed @development-tools, c++, clang, and the papirus-icon-theme. Everything else I needed to install was available in the Fedora repositories without having to add anything else, such as what you need to do with EPEL and RHEL.

Fedora Cinnamon showing some Papirus icons

I also need to point out that RHEL, CentOS Stream and Fedora Gnome install the brltty package, which means that if you plug anything into the USB ports of your computer that use USB for serial communication, then the brltty driver is invoked and attached to the port, making it impossible to use for anything else until that package is removed. I had to remove brltty under all three. I’m assuming this is another Gnome “feature” as it is not installed with the Fedora Cinnamon spin. That makes two big check marks in favor of the Cinnamon spin, the first being the lack of the parental controls application.

The greatest feature about using a Fedora distribution is the distribution’s adherence to always using the most up-to-date versions of any tool you have installed. Right off the bat I checked the Python version, which is 3.12. That version is so newly released that the paint on it is still a bit wet. The GCC and CLANG compiler tools are all the latest releases, which means they support the latest language standards. If you can find a Fedora version that suits you, then you can’t go wrong. The only “better” alternative might be Arch, but Arch is a rolling release, and I’ve been burned too many times by Arch committing update suicide to ever run it again.

Whether I move off Linux Mint is still unanswered at this point. What I will move to is also unanswered, although I’m strongly in favor of Fedora in spite of its nine month limited lifespan. Debian and, for that matter, LMDE, should be considered contenders, if for no other reason than they’re ahead of Linux Mint with regards to the currency of its software environment. But they are still behind (sometimes quite behind) of Fedora.

The greatest issue is properly setting up an environment that matches what I currently have under Linux Mint. I’ve expended a fair amount of effort over time to tune my instance of Linux Mint to be just what I want. Do I really want to go through that again? Another motto: Be careful what you ask for.

Links

fedora 39 vs rhel 9.3 — rhel, part 1