Re: Yet Another Linux Box

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

I'd been thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi 5 but when the Amazon Prime
Days had a bargain on the CanaKit I pulled the trigger. It's a little
smaller than I realized. The whole case with the Pi and a fan is the size
of a double deck of cards. The kit comes with the case, power supply, two
microHDMI cables, and a microSD preloaded with Raspberry Pi OS. The only
additional item I ordered was a female to female standard HDMI connector
to work with my KVM setup. Not bad for $135.
>
I put it together, fired it up and went through the usual language,
location, and wifi setup. As usual the first thing it did was updates. I
installed the pico SDK and VS Code with the Pico extension.  It does come
with Thonny which is a Python IDE. It's easy to use fo MicroPython  on the
Pico but I prefer Code with the Python extensions.
>
It's derived from Debian so it's the usual 'sudo apt'  process. The
desktop is a LXDE derivative, not too different from xcce. It comes with
Chrome and Firefox; you choose the default during the setup.
>
The whole setup was pretty painless so now I have an ARM Linux machine. I
mainly plan to use it with the Picos since it has the I/O pins needed for
debugging. Otherwise you need two Picos with one set up as a debugger.
There are many projects with the standalone Pi since the Header breaks out
the GPIO, SCI, PWM, and UART pins.

Nice! I have an older Pi that I had bought so my oldest grandson and I could
build a small retro-gaming machine. But he's moved on to following baseball and
American football religiously, so I put Debian on it and used it to build my
Qt-based MIDI project.  Takes forever!

My Trycoo mini PC has proven to be a nice little computer. It seems
subjectively about the same speed as my old ASUS laptop [1]. A couple of
minor issues remain:

    -   The picom compositor seems to cause some minor problems with
        window handling across two monitors. I got the source code
        from GitHub to get a much newer version than Debian Testing
        (trixie). The number of settings that can be modified is
        incredible.
    -   The instance of Conky that shows the current song playing in
        MPD shows up as a blank shadow. The Gkrellm-like Conky showing
        system status works fine.

Sometimes I hear the fan come on even when I'm not using it. It's quiet,
though.

[1] Right now the ASUS remains powered on, tucked underneath the desk, so
    that I can SSH into it now and then to get some configuration item or
    document I realize I need.

--
Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies.  :-)
-- Larry Wall in <199708040319.UAA16213@wall.org>