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--- blog:articles:raspberry:rpi5desktop [2024/07/20 19:54] – created Phil Ide
+++ blog:articles:raspberry:rpi5desktop [2024/07/30 11:00] (current) – [Summary] Phil Ide
@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 A quick visit to [[https://thepihut.com|The PiHut]] showed that there is already a growing ecosphere of add-on devices. I grabbed an RPi5 with 8Gb memory, a power supply, a "Pineboards HatDrive! Nano", a 256Gb SSD in M.2 format, and an RPi5 case.
-The HatDrive! Nano is a small and includes a 3amp buck converter, and this allows not only the use of the 256Gb M.2 SSD, but it can all fir inside the official RPi5 case. The picture shown here is everything except the power supply and with the lid of the case taken off so you can see how compactly it all fits together. I even found enough room to squeeze a large heatsink and fan in there.
+The HatDrive! Nano is small and includes a 3amp buck converter, and this allows not only the use of the 256Gb M.2 SSD, but it can all fit inside the official RPi5 case. The picture shown here is everything except the power supply and with the lid of the case taken off so you can see how compactly it all fits together. I even found enough room to squeeze a large heatsink and fan in there.
 ===== Installing the OS =====
 The Raspberry Pi systems usually have an operating system flashed to an SD card (the same sort as you put in your phone to give yourself more space for all those pictures you keep taking). An SSD plugged into a USB port offers not only a massive boost to read/write speeds over an SD card, but more stability and longer life too. The RPi3 introduced the capability to boot straight from a USB drive, opening the gate to both HDD and SSD.
-Getting the operating system on an SD, or a USB-SSD or USB-HDD is fairly straightforward: Take the storage device to another computer where you've installed the //Raspberry Pi Imager//, and flash the operating system of your choice on to - then plug it back into the RPi and switch the power on.
+Getting the operating system on an SD, or a USB-SSD or USB-HDD is fairly straightforward: Take the storage device to another computer where you've installed the //Raspberry Pi Imager//, and flash the operating system of your choice on to it - then plug it back into the RPi and switch the power on.
-However, to do that with an M.2 SSD, you need a cradle to take the SSD and make it visible to the computer where you'll be doing the flashing, and I don't have one those. Time to go old-school.
+However, to do that with an M.2 SSD, you need a cradle to take the SSD and make it visible to the computer where you'll be doing the flashing, and I don't have one those, but luckily the Raspberry Pi has a solution at hand.
-First, I take an SD card to my development rig and flash the **//Raspberry OS//** to it, then take it to the RPi5 and boot it up. I have a little HD monitor, keyboard and mouse for doing this kind of thing.
+If you boot with the Pi without a device with a boot partition attached to it - as is the case with my NVMe SSD (which was unformatted), then the Pi will attempt to bring the Raspberry Pi Imager software down from the internet. To do this, it needs to be attached to the local network by ethernet. After that, it works like any other flash install - select the type of device (RPi5) and OS to install, and the medium to install to - the NVMe drive. Configure with a default user and password and go and make a cup of coffee. All done, and when the RPi reboots, it is ready to go.
-Once the RPi5 has booted, I then call up the //Raspberry Pi Imager// and repeat the process, only this time I select the 256Gb SSD (which appears as an nvme device).
-Once that's done (and it is surprisingly quick), I powered down the Pi and removed the SD card, then turned it back on again. This time, it boots up from the SSD.
 So now that it's running, there are just a few configuration options to deal with. At this point it has been using an ethernet cable, but I'll not be using that where the Pi is going to be running, so I set up WiFi.
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 Next I installed some necessary software: The programming languages Go (golang), Rust and PHP. A small web server so I can do localised testing of web-based code; SublimeText - an excellent programmer's editor.
-I the moved the RPi5 (after powering it down again) to my secondary desk and plugged it into the KVM so it now shares a monitor, keyboard, mouse and  couple of USB ports with my development rig.
+I then moved the RPi5 (after powering it down again) to my secondary desk and plugged it into the KVM so it now shares a monitor, keyboard, mouse and  couple of USB ports with my development rig.
 ===== Testing =====
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 With an operating system with a GUI front end, there are several layers:
-. The kernel (this handle all the low-level stuff)
+  - The kernel (this handle all the low-level stuff)
-. The operating system (which handles input/output on disks, keyboards, mice etc, and organises the filesystem)
+  - The operating system (which handles input/output on disks, keyboards, mice etc, and organises the filesystem)
-. The windowing system - you can't see this, but it provides an consistent interface for the desktop
+  - The windowing system - you can't see this, but it provides a consistent interface for the desktop
-. The desktop - this is the collection of windows etc. you actually see
+  - The desktop - this is the collection of windows etc. you actually see
 It's more complicated than that, but that's the essential stuff. On Windows and Mac systems, you get one desktop and although you can personalise it a bit, you're stuck with the one desktop.
-On Linux and other unix-style operating systems, the windowing system is either X11 or Wayland, but there are dozens of different desktops. All my Linux Mint systems use Cinnamon, but the RPI5 uses PIXEL, which is based on LXDE. I changed the desktop to use the Cinnamon desktop and rebooted - and voila! It doesn't look exactly the same as my other, more powerful machines, but it's close enough.
+On Linux and other unix-style operating systems, the windowing system is either X11 or Wayland, but there are dozens of different desktops. All my Linux Mint systems use Cinnamon, but the RPI5 uses (by default) PIXEL, which is based on LXDE. I changed the desktop to use the Cinnamon desktop and rebooted - and voila! It doesn't look exactly the same as my other, more powerful machines, but it's close enough.
 Cinnamon is very configurable, but out of the box it looks very familiar to anyone coming from a Windows machine.
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 Because the RPi5 doesn't (yet) come in a model with 1 or 2Gb of memory, it doesn't come cheap, but it is still a lot cheaper than most of other computers with similar capabilities. It also has the same usage patterns as the previous RPi models, so it can be used in AI, Machine learning, robotics, learning electronics, programming, scientific research networking and teaching the basics of //Office Suite Software// (word-processing, spreadsheet, database, presentation).
-Raspberry Pi SOCs (system on a chip) SBC (single board computers) have been a delight in their intended market - schools - where affordable (and easily and cheaply replaceable) requirements are a must, and have been taken up by hobbyists for all sorts of unusual and interesting projects. The RPi5 is a powerful addition to the stable, and I am very happy that it is powerful enough to o some serious development work on.
+Raspberry Pi SOCs (system on a chip) SBC (single board computers) have been a delight in their intended market - schools - where affordable (and easily and cheaply replaceable) requirements are a must, and have been taken up by hobbyists for all sorts of unusual and interesting projects. The RPi5 is a powerful addition to the stable, and I am very happy that it is powerful enough to do some serious development work on.
+~~socialite~~
+~~DISCUSSION~~