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.

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>

Chris Ahlstrom wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> <brevsnip>
>
> 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.

Another issue! GIMP is not in the testing repo, though it's documentation and
help packages are!

Luckily, for now I need it only to make screen shots of application windows.
So I'm using ImageMagick's "import" app to do that.

--
Slow day. Practice crawling.