When I found a 240GB Western Digital SSD for what seemed to be a ridiculously low price compared with the prices I was used to seeing, I grabbed one. I planned to use it in my Gigabyte BRIX, but decided I would stick with the 500GB HDD because I tend to use a lot of space on the Brix.
But then in April 2017 Raspberry Pi 3 was modified with the ability to do a one time write to the system and enable booting from an external USB device instead of micro SD. I ran the configuration change and set up the Pi 3B+ to boot and run from the 240GB SSD, and it worked perfectly. I've been using the Pi on the SSD ever since.
a few weeks ago I saw a 500GB Crucial brand SSD again really cheap compared with the previous prices - and grabbed one for the Brix. It too some fiddling to clone the 500GB HDD to the SSD successfully (had to rn CloneZilla several times) but eventually I got it booting.
The difference on the Pi was noticeable, so I homed to reduce my boot times for Mint 19 PLASMA on the Brix from almost 3 minutes to something more like a normal distro.
I ended up with around about 1 minute to boot. But program start times have been reduced by a similar margin.
The difference running from SSD is significant. Is it worth the dollars? In my opinion - Yes.
Should I have changed to SSD sooner? I don;t think so. Not at the old SSD prices.
In fact if I wasn;t now running Plasma 5 on Mint 19 on the Brix, I don't think I would have bothered. But Plasma 5 is just so gluggish after Mint 17KDE that I felt like I was back on an old 386 system trying to run Windows 95. With the SSD, Plasma 5 is bearable. I have no idea how the Plasma team managed to put MORE stuff into the environment, and make it so slow and awkward after the lovely snappy Plasma 4 they had. Hopefully some time, they will get Plasma 5 fixed - but until then, at least running from an SSD it is usable.
Thursday 1 November 2018
Can the New Raspberry Pi 3 be used as a Desktop Computer?
November 2018 UPDATE
Somehow I managed to completely forget to publish this. I see, reading it that it was written using a Raspberry Pi 2 !! At the moment I am writing on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ after updating my Pi every time a new model came out.
Whilst I believe the Pi 2 was quite capable of most day to day tasks when I was writing this post, the Pi 3B+ is almost on a par with my Gigabyte Brix except for RAM. I added a $75 SSD drive with a 240GB capacity and the Pi now runs and boots off that, I also added splitters so I can run an external HDD with media, and while that still has some limits regarding power usage, for almost everything it runs like a dream.
LibreOffice boots almost immediately, GIMP does most Filter edits quite quickly, although I had to tweak some setting and set up a swap file. But overall, it is great. Boot times did not improve a lot over booting from microSD, but they are significantly faster booting from SSD compared to boot from HDD. I haven't tried it with the 15" TV because currently it is output to the 50" LED TV. But I think the battery draw would not be a huge problem in the van as a desktop system. If I was still living on my yachts, I am sure I would be using the Pi as an onboard computing and media centre.
The reality however is that for the cost of a Pi, plus a decent display and wireless or bluetooth keyboard/mouse (or touchpad) and a hard drive - you can get a low end but still more powerful laptop. On the other hand, the Pi is so convenient if you already have most of those things.
Can it be used as a Desktop Computer? Well, I use it as one, and sometimes I completely forget I am not using my main computer!
Here's the original post...
The original Raspberry Pi was designed to be used as a cheap educational tool to encourage kids to learn more about computing by making computers easy, affordable and fun. These days when most children in developed countries have access to smart phones, tablets,computers and the Internet, it might seem like a strange idea. However, not all kids are encouraged to tinker with the family computer.
Being able to buy a simple computer that could be hooked up to any HDMI enabled TV or even an older TV with composite video, and just plug in any USB keyboard and mouse meant that many children had a computer available for the first time that they could play with, without risking losing the family's data or even killing the family computer. Add to that that this device is the size of a credit card, and we now have a completely portable computer.
Over the years since Raspberry Pi was introduced, it has been upgraded. One important upgrade was adding two more USB ports. Another was increasing the on board RAM to 1GB. There is still no NAND flash RAM as is seen in some clones of the Raspberry Pi, but SD cards are not so expensive these days. A 32GB micro SD card provides plenty of space for a Linux operating system and sufficient programs to run the device. And there is the advantage that changing to another operating system is simply a matter of swapping SD cards.
So kids have a great little educational tool to learn programming and to play some games. But what about us old folk?
Well, I am writing this on a Raspberry Pi 2. And Blogger is behaving far more responsively on the Pi than it does on my desktop computer. Things happen a little more slowly with heavy duty tasks like graphics manipulation, but overall, simple day to day stuff is great. At least as good as my old Acer Aspire 5315 laptop. Actually, that is wrong. The reality is that the Raspberry Pi is performing far better than the old acer. And although I use a 64GB USB stick to store my data, with a 32GB micro USB for the operating system (Linux Raspbian) the Acer Aspire only had 32GB available on its hard drive anyway. So the Raspberry Pi actually has about three times the storage that the Arcer had.
So let's look at day to day tasks.
First off is web browsing and other Internet related stuff. Raspbian comes with ite Epiphany web browser. But I have added Guenther Kriedl's kweb. kweb has some advantages. One of the main ones is that it is fast. Very, very fast. But the big hidden treasure is that it offloads many tasks to other programs.
Viewing YouTube videos in the highest resolution available on YouTube at the moment is smooth and silky. Faster and smoother than on my MD desktop computer. In fact, I often find myself downloading a video for later viewing on the desktop machine. But not on the Raspberry Pi. kweb calls omxplayerGUI (Guenther Kreidl's GUI version of the best video player for Raspbian) and uses that to play YouTube video. SO I find myself using the Raspberry Pi, hooked up to the HDMI port of my big screen TV to play YouTube videos in full screen. And with the audio jack of the Raspberry Pi, I usually switch the audio from HDMI to Analog through my sound system.
UPDATE:
I upgraded Raspbian jessie using sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade
That killed audio. Before the upgrade it was possible to right click the speaker icon and swap ausio output between HDMI and ANALOG in all programs. After the upgrade, omxplayer plays ONLY HDMI, while others such as SMplayer, VLC, Kodi all still swap output according to the right click toggle on the volume icon on the panel.
A fresh install of the latest Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi 3 without any other players installed except kweb (including omxplayer) shows it is definitely a problem with Raspbian and omxplayer, and not caused by the other players. In fact as soon as I installed VLC and KODI, I could immediately control the audio switching between Analog and HDMI in those programs with the toggle. But omxplayer still only plays through HDMI.
Command line using the omxplayer -o options did nothing to fix it, and modprobe and change the arguments for alsa also did nothing. It is a bit annoying as the only way I can get omxplayer to output to my sound system is to plug it into the headphone socket of my TV, and that creates a lot of annoying crackling noise through the sound system.
As far as playback goes, the Raspberry Pi 3 is in a class all its own. I thought the Pi 2 was good. The Pi 3 is flawless. I am using a dual port Laser brand USB charger bought from Big W some time ago for about $25. It supposedly outputs 2.4 Amps to each port and draws 10W. But I noticed it did not like powering the Pi 3 and a Pi 2 at the same time, where it happily powers two Raspberry Pi 2s.
On the other hand it provides sufficient power to let the Pi 3 spin a 1TB usb hard drive off its USB port with no problems at all. And after an hour and a half of high res movie playback The Raspberry Pi 3 is not getting as hot as the Pi 2 did. Actually it seemed to be getting pretty warm for a while, then the case started to feel cooler. But the performance remained the same, so if it is slipping into a lowe power mode when it heats up, it doesn't seem to affect operation.
A very few web sites will not render in kweb. It is designed without any Flash component. But far fewer of us are designing websites using Flash these days anyway. So for most web sites kweb on the Raspberry Pi is about as fast as you can get on anything. And far faster than most. I have noticed that some of my bootstrap pages render a little strangely though.
What about an Office Suite? LibreOffice takes 4 seconds to open to the default screen on my Raspberry Pi 2, then another 4 seconds to open a blank Writer document. That is for the first time it is opened in a session. Once it has been opened once and is in memory it usually takes 4 seconds to open straight into a Libre Writer document but only 2 seconds to open just to the main Libre Office screen.
GIMP 2.8 is heavy handed though. From start, to open and ready to use with all its tools and extensions loaded it takes 23 seconds on my Raspberry Pi 2 but only 9 seconds on my Raspberry Pi 3. That compares with 16 seconds on my AMD desktop and a lot faster than on the old Acer Aspire 5315 laptop.
My personal conclusion for now is that the Raspberry Pi can indeed be used as a completely stand alone desktop replacement for older desktop and laptops for day to day work.
I have already done some intense Imagemagick operations with a set of very complex bash scripts and some python code. The Pi 2 handled it in only a little longer than the AMD desktop. I will be interested to see how long it takes the Raspberry Pi 3 to complete the same tasks.
And the big test will be comparing some video work with mencoder and with OpenShot to the AMD desktop computer.
However there is one small glitch that few people mention. Drivers for some printers can be an issue. I will cover drivers for certain printers and possible solutions in a future post.
And there will be an update comparing the Raspberry Pi 3 with the same basic programs, as well as an in depth look at kweb and omxplayerGUI.
Somehow I managed to completely forget to publish this. I see, reading it that it was written using a Raspberry Pi 2 !! At the moment I am writing on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ after updating my Pi every time a new model came out.
Whilst I believe the Pi 2 was quite capable of most day to day tasks when I was writing this post, the Pi 3B+ is almost on a par with my Gigabyte Brix except for RAM. I added a $75 SSD drive with a 240GB capacity and the Pi now runs and boots off that, I also added splitters so I can run an external HDD with media, and while that still has some limits regarding power usage, for almost everything it runs like a dream.
LibreOffice boots almost immediately, GIMP does most Filter edits quite quickly, although I had to tweak some setting and set up a swap file. But overall, it is great. Boot times did not improve a lot over booting from microSD, but they are significantly faster booting from SSD compared to boot from HDD. I haven't tried it with the 15" TV because currently it is output to the 50" LED TV. But I think the battery draw would not be a huge problem in the van as a desktop system. If I was still living on my yachts, I am sure I would be using the Pi as an onboard computing and media centre.
The reality however is that for the cost of a Pi, plus a decent display and wireless or bluetooth keyboard/mouse (or touchpad) and a hard drive - you can get a low end but still more powerful laptop. On the other hand, the Pi is so convenient if you already have most of those things.
Can it be used as a Desktop Computer? Well, I use it as one, and sometimes I completely forget I am not using my main computer!
Here's the original post...
The original Raspberry Pi was designed to be used as a cheap educational tool to encourage kids to learn more about computing by making computers easy, affordable and fun. These days when most children in developed countries have access to smart phones, tablets,computers and the Internet, it might seem like a strange idea. However, not all kids are encouraged to tinker with the family computer.
Being able to buy a simple computer that could be hooked up to any HDMI enabled TV or even an older TV with composite video, and just plug in any USB keyboard and mouse meant that many children had a computer available for the first time that they could play with, without risking losing the family's data or even killing the family computer. Add to that that this device is the size of a credit card, and we now have a completely portable computer.
Over the years since Raspberry Pi was introduced, it has been upgraded. One important upgrade was adding two more USB ports. Another was increasing the on board RAM to 1GB. There is still no NAND flash RAM as is seen in some clones of the Raspberry Pi, but SD cards are not so expensive these days. A 32GB micro SD card provides plenty of space for a Linux operating system and sufficient programs to run the device. And there is the advantage that changing to another operating system is simply a matter of swapping SD cards.
So kids have a great little educational tool to learn programming and to play some games. But what about us old folk?
Well, I am writing this on a Raspberry Pi 2. And Blogger is behaving far more responsively on the Pi than it does on my desktop computer. Things happen a little more slowly with heavy duty tasks like graphics manipulation, but overall, simple day to day stuff is great. At least as good as my old Acer Aspire 5315 laptop. Actually, that is wrong. The reality is that the Raspberry Pi is performing far better than the old acer. And although I use a 64GB USB stick to store my data, with a 32GB micro USB for the operating system (Linux Raspbian) the Acer Aspire only had 32GB available on its hard drive anyway. So the Raspberry Pi actually has about three times the storage that the Arcer had.
So let's look at day to day tasks.
First off is web browsing and other Internet related stuff. Raspbian comes with ite Epiphany web browser. But I have added Guenther Kriedl's kweb. kweb has some advantages. One of the main ones is that it is fast. Very, very fast. But the big hidden treasure is that it offloads many tasks to other programs.
Viewing YouTube videos in the highest resolution available on YouTube at the moment is smooth and silky. Faster and smoother than on my MD desktop computer. In fact, I often find myself downloading a video for later viewing on the desktop machine. But not on the Raspberry Pi. kweb calls omxplayerGUI (Guenther Kreidl's GUI version of the best video player for Raspbian) and uses that to play YouTube video. SO I find myself using the Raspberry Pi, hooked up to the HDMI port of my big screen TV to play YouTube videos in full screen. And with the audio jack of the Raspberry Pi, I usually switch the audio from HDMI to Analog through my sound system.
UPDATE:
I upgraded Raspbian jessie using sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade
That killed audio. Before the upgrade it was possible to right click the speaker icon and swap ausio output between HDMI and ANALOG in all programs. After the upgrade, omxplayer plays ONLY HDMI, while others such as SMplayer, VLC, Kodi all still swap output according to the right click toggle on the volume icon on the panel.
A fresh install of the latest Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi 3 without any other players installed except kweb (including omxplayer) shows it is definitely a problem with Raspbian and omxplayer, and not caused by the other players. In fact as soon as I installed VLC and KODI, I could immediately control the audio switching between Analog and HDMI in those programs with the toggle. But omxplayer still only plays through HDMI.
Command line using the omxplayer -o options did nothing to fix it, and modprobe and change the arguments for alsa also did nothing. It is a bit annoying as the only way I can get omxplayer to output to my sound system is to plug it into the headphone socket of my TV, and that creates a lot of annoying crackling noise through the sound system.
As far as playback goes, the Raspberry Pi 3 is in a class all its own. I thought the Pi 2 was good. The Pi 3 is flawless. I am using a dual port Laser brand USB charger bought from Big W some time ago for about $25. It supposedly outputs 2.4 Amps to each port and draws 10W. But I noticed it did not like powering the Pi 3 and a Pi 2 at the same time, where it happily powers two Raspberry Pi 2s.
On the other hand it provides sufficient power to let the Pi 3 spin a 1TB usb hard drive off its USB port with no problems at all. And after an hour and a half of high res movie playback The Raspberry Pi 3 is not getting as hot as the Pi 2 did. Actually it seemed to be getting pretty warm for a while, then the case started to feel cooler. But the performance remained the same, so if it is slipping into a lowe power mode when it heats up, it doesn't seem to affect operation.
A very few web sites will not render in kweb. It is designed without any Flash component. But far fewer of us are designing websites using Flash these days anyway. So for most web sites kweb on the Raspberry Pi is about as fast as you can get on anything. And far faster than most. I have noticed that some of my bootstrap pages render a little strangely though.
What about an Office Suite? LibreOffice takes 4 seconds to open to the default screen on my Raspberry Pi 2, then another 4 seconds to open a blank Writer document. That is for the first time it is opened in a session. Once it has been opened once and is in memory it usually takes 4 seconds to open straight into a Libre Writer document but only 2 seconds to open just to the main Libre Office screen.
GIMP 2.8 is heavy handed though. From start, to open and ready to use with all its tools and extensions loaded it takes 23 seconds on my Raspberry Pi 2 but only 9 seconds on my Raspberry Pi 3. That compares with 16 seconds on my AMD desktop and a lot faster than on the old Acer Aspire 5315 laptop.
My personal conclusion for now is that the Raspberry Pi can indeed be used as a completely stand alone desktop replacement for older desktop and laptops for day to day work.
I have already done some intense Imagemagick operations with a set of very complex bash scripts and some python code. The Pi 2 handled it in only a little longer than the AMD desktop. I will be interested to see how long it takes the Raspberry Pi 3 to complete the same tasks.
And the big test will be comparing some video work with mencoder and with OpenShot to the AMD desktop computer.
However there is one small glitch that few people mention. Drivers for some printers can be an issue. I will cover drivers for certain printers and possible solutions in a future post.
And there will be an update comparing the Raspberry Pi 3 with the same basic programs, as well as an in depth look at kweb and omxplayerGUI.
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