Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am playing with some SD cards I got to try out additional systems for my Raspberry Pi 4. Let’s get started!
The Plan
I would like a computer where I can format drives without having to worry about nuking any drives I can’t easily repair should I get a single keystroke wrong again. I need a quarantine machine.
Earlier this year, I got a Raspberry Pi 4 to serve as a head/firewall for a model supercomputer (still pending). Back then, I found three microSD cards, but only one was good for booting Raspian, and I ended up with a neat, little Wi-Fi to Ethernet router. I like my reverse wireless router. I don’t want to give up my reverse wireless router.
I started shopping for microSD cards, and came across a then-recent Tom’s Hardware article where they tested several brands for use with Raspberry Pis and compared them in different areas. Going off their recommendation, I selected the Silicon Power 3D NAND. I figured I may want more than one, so I got a 5 pack. The next size up was 10, and I’m not quite that avid a Pi user at the present time.
Besides a Quarantine Machine, additional applications include:
a general purpose operating system,
an actual firewall/supercomputer head
a media center
a home-network wide ad blocker
And it would be good to have a backup of my Quarantine card in case I really goof it.
Manjaro ARM
While I was installing Manjaro on my desktop, I noticed they have a version for ARM processors, such as the Raspberry Pi. They even maintain an image for installation on the Pi. I went with XFCE to preview for an upcoming project.
Installation was a nightmare due to user error. I must have tried three or four times to load Manjaro onto the first partition on a microSD card. Along the way, I found a thread where someone was reporting issues with installing the current version, 20.08 (named after the year.month), and people told him to try 20.06. My advice: if you’re thinking about trying to install any version of Manjaro, don’t try to downgrade. I don’t remember how I did it, but I got an older image to update later.
Once I went back to the official documentation and saw I was supposed to aim the dd command directly to the drive itself, I got it next try using the older image. The interface to finish installing felt unintuitive, leaving me to research keyboard standards. I would not recommend for anyone new to Linux.
Where the installer lacked polish, the XFCE desktop environment made up for it with some nicely preconfigured settings. Perhaps I was a bit harsh on it before. I was especially happy to be rid of the ugly, black lines around the screen present on Raspian. And of course, once I found the pacman command to update and checked the version, 20.10 had been released.
I went to hone this install in, reviewing some of my past lessons. A brief search didn’t help me set a static IP, but I moved on anyway. SSH was enabled by default, but it gave me an infuriating time confirming the host key fingerprint. I ended up caving to move on, but I did learn something about the improved security of a newer standard called Ed22519.
Raspup
Puppy Linux –in theory– is an excellent choice for an expendable Linux install on a Quarantine Machine because. It’s small, it’s enough to get you by as a daily driver if you can stand its slightly offbeat control scheme, and most importantly, it’s easy enough to reinstall. It’s also made for x86.
That’s where the people over at Raspup stepped in earlier this year. Installation was much easier than Manjaro, but that was where the polish ended. It’s so new, they don’t show up on Distrowatch. Their site doesn’t have a recognized security certificate, and has some oddball domain going on.
As for the operating system itself, I found its lack of Ctrl+Alt+T bringing up a terminal to be the greatest shortcoming in terms of my user experience. It also seemed obsessed with using linked GUI windows for everything initial setup. It also took way too long to boot up. While it did have those black bars around the screen, it did have a utility to adjust them between reboots. I don’t have the patience for it right now.
The most impressive thing about Raspup is their claim to work on any Raspberry Pi version, though the compute module remains untested. I honestly wish this project the best of luck, but at present, I can only recommend this cute, little project if you’re bored, want to poke around with something new, and have a spare microSD card for your pi. [Link to Raspup]
Other Projects
My goal was to also include a media station, but that didn’t install correctly as my research window for this week was closing. I’d also like to see about extracting an IR sensor from a dead piece of hardware, but that project can easily fill its own month of blogs.
While doing my write-up, I considered Tiny Core again, and there appears to be one for the Pi. I may do this one on the sly without reporting on it.
Six plus microSD cards is a lot to manage for a single Raspberry Pi. The five pack cards each came with an adapter, so I borrowed a label maker and applied labels to those.
Closing thoughts
One of the quirks I noticed with Manjaro on the Pi was that my USB SD card reader was showing up as /dev/sdc. Normally, SD family cards, such as the one inserted directly onto the motherboard at the time, have a different designation, so that’s something to look into. On the other hand, this discrepancy may be just what I’m after in terms of a safe computer to blast away at disk destroying operations. It only took one wrong keystroke, and if I don’t pursue Tiny/MicroCore Linux again, this may have the safety margin I need where I can disconnect any unneeded drives without opening any cases.
Final Question
What other Pi distros would you like to see reviewed on here?