Baking a Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi computers have been on my radar for quite a long time. Even more so since they launched the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B  last year. For not a lot of money, you get quite a bit of hardware and that got me thinking. Could I replace my virtual Linux machine used for development and testing with a physical Raspberry Pi?

If the Raspberry Pi was not suited for my Linux needs, it could certainly run some targets in our Starcade so that would be the backup plan.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 8GB of RAM 
• SanDisk 32GB Extreme Micro SD Card 
• Argon ONE Case 
• Argon ONE Power Supply 
• Micro HDMI to HDMI Cable 

Besides the above hardware, I already had ethernet and audio cables along with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

Assembling everything was quite enjoyable. The Argon case is very well designed and since everything was so small, assembly was a task I enjoyed without my glasses. Using my biological powers of zoom aka nearsightedness. O_O

The software on the other hand... would be more of a challenge.

Software

Having too many choices can be overwhelming so the constraints for this project were as follows.

• A 64-bit operating system that can take advantage of 8GB of RAM.
• An operating system as similar to Ubuntu as possible.
• A visual interface that I could live with.

I'm going to spoil any sense of a narrative going on here and tell you I spent three days on software. Three days of installing, customizing, overclocking, hacking, and reinstalling. Over and over again. Gaining Linux experience sure but also feeling like a failure as time grinded on.

In the end, it did not matter if the OS was an official image from Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi, a flavour of Ubuntu, or the currently in beta, 64-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS. I could not conjure up a collection of software and settings without visual issues. Deal breakers like tearing, screen blanking, lag, and/or high CPU use.

I am in no way a Linux or Raspberry Pi expert but forum and open source repositories point to a better video driver in development. Specifically for the Raspberry Pi and 64-bit operating systems. I may have just arrived on the scene a bit too early for my own use case.

So, that is why I'm going to put this nearly baked Raspberry Pi into storage for now. Hopefully the future will reveal better video drivers and if not... it can always be put to use in the Starcade. ^_^