Any PLUG meeting Aug 15?

[buster]

We could leave all this for the September meeting when we'd have lots of room. Spread out on tables. Might be easier. But whatever....

[fox]

Or we could do both. All I really want to see on Thursday is how responsive a desktop Linux distro is on an Rpi, as my experience was different from what Jason was describing. I wasn't thinking here of an "Rpi expo"; we could do that in a regular meeting. I'm OK either way; if this is too much of a hassle, we can save it.

[buster]

Assuming there will be 5 of us. Think Dougal is coming.

[Jason Wallwork]

Five sounds great - probably largest MUG we've had in a while. I guess Thursday nights are the sweet point for most people.

Btw, it's no hassle for me to bring in my 24" since Mike has offered a ride (Thanks, Mike!). Hopefully the Timmy workers won't think we're moving in! 

Looking at Arch for my Pi now but I'll wait until after the meeting before I change anything on it. The cool thing is that you can use Etcher the same whether it's a USB thumb drive or micro-SD card. You just have to have the right Arm-based ISO.

[fox]

Jason isn't coming.

[ssfc72]

Luckily Mike brought his Raspberry Pi3 computer and with my pico projector, he was able to show how responsive the RPi was, running Ubuntu Mate (not very responsive) and then the Kodi distro ( quite responsive). :-)

[Jason Wallwork]

Sorry that I didn't make it guys. I was exhausted yesterday due to getting up too early and just not having a great day. I'll try to make the next one. Would still like to compare how my Pi 3 functions compared to Mike to find out if there is a difference or we just have different standards for what's usable.

[fox]

Bill forgot to mention that there was talk last night of revisiting the Beginner Linux Distros. It has been awhile since that section was updated, and perhaps some changes would be in order.

[cod3poet]

That sounds like a fun project to put together, I have been creating a metric ton of documentation for work and lots of training for some of my Junior engineers so I'd be glad to assist as long as you forgive me for running them in Hyper-V on Windows 10. Another consideration is a try before you buy guide on how to setup the Windows Subsystem for Linux on windows 10 as well. Gives you a full (non-gui) linux system that you can safely mess around in without having to fiddle with boot loaders. Works with Centos and Suse as well FYI.

[Jason Wallwork]

That sounds like a fun project to put together, I have been creating a metric ton of documentation for work and lots of training for some of my Junior engineers so I'd be glad to assist as long as you forgive me for running them in Hyper-V on Windows 10. Another consideration is a try before you buy guide on how to setup the Windows Subsystem for Linux on windows 10 as well. Gives you a full (non-gui) linux system that you can safely mess around in without having to fiddle with boot loaders. Works with Centos and Suse as well FYI.

Do you mean agreeing to assist with the Beginner Linux Distros article? You lost me at "That sounds like a fun project to put together."

In any case, regarding the article, if somebody wants to update it or create a new list entirely, I'd be happy to post it. They could ask for votes on good beginner distros or create some criteria and then put in distros that fit them. My initial idea with that article was to keep the list not too big as beginners already are confused by the number of choices and to keep off distros that might confuse beginners like certain distros that when you update you're asked if you want to keep the present configuration file or get the new one during updates or that make it difficult to get codecs or install codecs. But you guys or all of us could come up with the criteria but somebody would need to take the lead. I'd suggest Mike or Harry because they're so organized.

[fox]

Luckily Mike brought his Raspberry Pi3 computer and with my pico projector, he was able to show how responsive the RPi was, running Ubuntu Mate (not very responsive) and then the Kodi distro ( quite responsive). :-)

I was inspired to test my Pi3 at home after our meeting, connected to a 1080p monitor. My version of Ubuntu Mate (16.04) is truly awful; I wouldn't call it usable at all. Kodi (also an old version) is more responsive, but when I tried to play a video residing on my usb stick, the playback was jerky.

I thought about this some more, and I'm now asking myself whether booting from the usb stick does make it faster, since the port it is connected to is only usb 2. It might have been a few years ago when SD cards were very slow, but now you can get them with read speeds above 100 mb/sec; about 4 times what you can get out of anything attached to a usb 2 port. The second consideration is the age of my distros, as newer versions are supposed to be more optimized for the Rpi. The third is whether Ubuntu Mate is as good as Raspbian on a Pi. Since Raspian is what is being pushed by the foundation that makes the Pi's, I think it will run better. The fourth is whether my booting system, berryboot, is any better than noobs. (Berryboot is good for setting up with multiple distros on the same volume.)

At any rate, our PLUG MUG has motivated me to dust off my Rpi, try a few things and report back. Incidentally, I read a review of the Rpi 4 in Linux Pro. It gives it very high marks, but notes that there are a few things in the hardware that don't work as well as they should, that they expect to fix in an updated version. I'm glad I read that because I'm would like to buy a Pi 4, but now I think I'll hold back a few months. The biggest advantage to the new model, as far as I'm concerned, is that it has two usb 3 ports and is now set to boot from usb (without having to init from an SD card, which is how I get my Pi to boot from usb). Those changes will make a Pi into usable desktop computer.