December 21 2018
2018 has been an interesting year. Between lots of doubts about ever getting a Linux KDE distro working properly in the Brix, and the new Raspberry Pi 3B+ being released and finding out it is firstly a power hog (compared to earlier models) and secondly, a hell of an improvement over them. Life has been interesting.
Towards the end of the year, Mint dropped the KDE release of Mint (from Mint 19 onwards). A lot of trial and error with everything from various releases of Mint, including the late KDE releases, to trying Kubuntu and KDE Neon and failing miserably with all of them, led to eventual success after installing Plasma 5 into Mint 19 XFCE. This time the system is rock solid and almost as fast as Mint 17.3 KDE. It is so good actually, that I have finally been able to use Mint 19 “PLASMA” as my every day system and even have all my video wallpapers and graphics scripts working perfectly.
To top it off, with a full screen animated desktop (including sound of rain in a tropical forest), as well as Chromium with a couple of tabs open, and LibreOffice open editing a document, the Mint 19 XFPE (Plasma 5 installed into Mint 19 XFCE) is using less than 2.0GB of system memory and since I have 8GB RAM it never goes into swap unless I am doing some pretty heavy video editing etc. In fact the highest I have actually seen in system load is 3.7GB since I got this working. Previous distros with Plasma 5 often got into the 7GB memory use region.
My next job will be to install Linux Mint Debian Edition into the old Mint KDE 17.3 /root so I can test it against the day when Mint might move away from Ubuntu base. I also swapped the 500GB HDD for a Crucial brand 500GB SSD at remarkably good price, and the poor old Brix feels like a new more powerful computer.
As for ahe Raspberry Pi. The serious problems there, were caused as I suspected, by not enough power coming from the USB power adapters I was using. Today I found a dual USB power adapter that has 2.4 amps out of one USB socket, and 1 amp out of the other. I hooked up the Pi main power in, to the 2.4 Amp socket, and the male plugs of a y-splitter cable to the USB socket of the Pi and the 1Amp output socket of the same adapter. The bootable SSD is plugged into the female socket of the splitter cable.
That seems to have solved the Pi’s power dramas. Now I have done something similar with the other y-splitter cable. One male end to the Pi USB, the other male end to one socket of my old twin port USB power adapter. That leaves the female socket of the y-splitter cable free to plug in an external USB drive with media files on it.
Tested it tonight and it works great. No more lightning bolt low power warning. No more boot failures or screen flashing on and off under load.
December 22 2018
The Raspberry Pi is still behaving itself nicely this morning, and some things are even working faster that on the Brix. One example is LinreOffice, which opens and edits considerably more quickly, probably because of the low overhead of Raspbian. Although on the Pi I also had Firefox and Chromium open when I opened Libre, while on the Brix, there was nothing open.
But overall, the Raspberry Pi is responding well to the increase of power with the new adapter setup. In theory there is a maximum of 5.8 Amps available when all USB adapters are being used to power the Pi and external drives. But most of the time only the new adapter for a total of 3.4 is used. (the main 2.4 Amp USB output to power the Pi and the 1.o Amp USB output to power the SSD). The second 2 outlet adapter is only needed if I plug in an external USB drive for multimedia.
The difference in performance though is amazing :-)
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