On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 11:47 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> wrote:
| From: Aruna Hewapathirane via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

| Hi Mat, many thanks and the more ram it has on board the better. This is
| strictly
| for my own experimenting and learn by doing stuff. So any Pi will do to
| start off with I guess.
|
| I am hoping to go down the embedded linux rabbit hole. I have been messing
| around
| with arduino for a while now and  I guess it is now time to move on to
| something a little
| easier to compile and test a linux kernel on :-)

Any Raspberry Pi would do for what you just said until you get to the last
line.

If you don't care about kernel build time, I *guess* that any Pi would do,
but I don't know.

I do very much care about the build time. I was thinking of cross compiling on my
ancient desktop then moving it to the Pi ?


| I am also very interested in seeing if a Pi can replace my ancient desktop.
| I simply can't
| afford the Pi-4 desktop version with the dual monitor setup

You don't need two monitors so you can remove that cost.  You can probably
use your old monitor, keyboard, and mouse (you might need dongles to
convert between old and new standards).

Agreed all I need is a single monitor.

What are the specs of your ancient desktop?

Well.. like I said pretty old my bios is:
cat /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_date
07/05/2013

and lscpu shows:
Architecture:          x86_64
CPU(s):                4
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    2
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
Model:                 60
Model name:            Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4130 CPU @ 3.40GHz
CPU MHz:               3389.375
CPU max MHz:           3400.0000
CPU min MHz:           800.0000
BogoMIPS:              6784.89 

and free -h shows:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7.5G       5.2G       2.3G       341M       163M       2.1G
-/+ buffers/cache:       2.9G       4.6G
Swap:         902M         0B       902M

it's not a bad system I just want to start messing with a Pi :-)



Most ancient desktops are actually more powerful than a Pi.  For some
meanings of "ancient".  If yours is really ancient, I would guess that
there is a cast-off PC that is less ancient.

If you put a premium on "cute" and don't mind the various inconveniences,
a Pi can surely be used as your main general-purpose desktop.
---

Thank you for all the pointers and advice.
 
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