I’m not too familiar with linux so sometime i have no idea how to solve some task when i didn’t find ready answer.
So. I bought Asus Tinker Board raspberry like mini pc. I’m going to use it as simple desktop pc in my garage and as host for flash/control mpcnc.
Firstly i tried TinkerOS 2.0.8. It’s debian based distro. I found that i can install freecad in synaptic. And it (freecad) works pretty nice.
But i realized that i can’t use thinkeros. Firstly it has buggy packages - after update chromium 0.72 crashes on launch. And visual studio code stopped working. Also some generic tasks pretty ugly.
So i decided to switch to armbian bionic. It’s ubuntu based. As os it performs much better and user friendly. System settings are nice, browser is working, etc. I like it.
But here is another issues. Firstly synaptic hangs on search. Secondary is that i can’t find freecad in packeges. Not in apt install nor in synaptic.
Does anyone tried freecad on armbian?
Or can i somehow extend list of sources where apt takes packages?
The linux on arm is relatively new, so things aren’t as polished as on a regular intel processor machine. Everything needs to be recompiled, so anything that does without errors gets shipped and stuff that doesn’t get triaged to port the most important (popular) stuff first.
Does bionic for arm support snaps? That might be good for something like freecad. They are basically containers for running apps. They have been pushed into bionic and other Linux OSs.
I’ve had good luck with firefox on my raspberry pi and my bionic laptops.
FTR, my development laptop is ubuntu bionic and it screams, very few issues so far. The intel makes a big difference.
Yes, dietpi interesting distro. I was tried to use it, but when i had only orange pi zero. It was a time little bit after when they decided to drop support of all orange pi devices due bad quality of kernel from the manufacturer.
Then i bought raspberry pi 3 and use raspbian with it. Because it “native” and i can found an answer to almost any question.
Anyway, dietpi looks nice.
Firstly, it declares that it most optimized for run as embedded on flash media.
Secondary, it has own “store” well selected set of optimized and tested software that is useful and popular. It easy to setup it.
Only thing i didn’t get why it doesn’t prompt to make new user during setup. If you will not make new user manually you will continue use it as root.
I think it’s really meant to be a way to repeatably set up services, not user environments. I considered using it for v1pi, but I thought it might be too intimidating for some.
If you have a python script and an mqtt server running on a pi, you can set it up with a config file, and then create it with one command. If the SD card dies, or you want the latest version, it’s one command to create it again. It would be a bit of a pain to use with a mouse and monitor though (IMO).
Yep, diet mainly targeted to headless applications. In list of promoted applications there are smart home server, mqtt daemon, influxdb, grafana, octoprint and other applications.
But i need device with desktop. Honestly i can buy some atom based board or even build small itx based pc. Then i can have almost everything that i used to have installed in computer.
But i still play with these micropc and treat this as a challenge.
