On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 8:42 AM Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Thu., Mar. 4, 2021, 22:48 Aruna Hewapathirane, <aruna.hewapathirane@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh my .. Thank you so much Stewart. Nearest major intersection is  Lawrence Ave West and Caledonia Road.

Ah; other end of town. We can work something out. 

I can come to any subway station on the Kennedy line or anywhere on the LRT line. I don't drive Stewart am a confirmed TTC-cerian and pedestrian.

I've also got a FireFly SBC you can have. Twice the memory, built-in (small) bootable storage, about as fast as the Raspberry Pi 3. Seems to be 32-bit ARM only (unlike Raspberry Pi, which can go 64-bit, but that's slightly futile in 1 GB), and kernel upgrades and boot process is fiddly. Nice machine, but minimal community support.

Wow thanks :-)
 
I was thinking of cross compiling then moving it to the Pi ? What do you think  ? A lot faster and very much
less error prone ? 

The Raspberry Pi's kernel is still (IIRC) not 100% mainstream, so some magic may be required. The supplied and supported Debian-derived Raspberry Pi OS is 32-bit, but has a userland that has all the built-in hardware supported. Go to any other OS and you lose that. I've never felt the need to go outside that.

Understood. I just want to try and build the smallest lightest kernel. Like puppy linux or knoppix. I use Debian at home so this is good news.
 
I was a little surprised to see you running Raspberry Pi OS on VirtualBox.

Well I was surprised myself. After what Giles said I wanted to test this but had no hardware or a Pi to test on. So I gave Virtualbox a shot and it did work :-)
 
Looks like you're running the x86 Raspberry Pi Desktop for Intel - supplied and maintained by the Foundation so old PCs can be reused as workalike devices in the classroom.

This is one major reason why I am starting to explore SBC's. Someday I want to get a computer ( Pi or Firefly or other SBC ) into every single home in resource poor settings like say Zambia where I grew up most of
my teen years or Sri Lanka where I was born or even the Phillipines where the poverty level bought tears to my eyes after watching youtube documentaries. I know big dreams.. who knows... nothing ventured.. nothing gained eh :-)
 
The Raspberry Pi boards are all ARM, so you'd be running something different and your cross-compilation would need to add an armhf step. Unless VirtualBox has gone all ARM too, you're not running the same OS at all. 

I did not have time yesterday to try QEMU. I will setup QEMU later today and put Raspberry Pi OS through all the hoops and loops. I am going to try anyway.
 

Cheers
 Stewart


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