The Raspberry Pi 4

What is a Raspberry Pi computer?

The Raspberry Pi computer is a tiny computer about the size of a deck of playing cards. It is very inexpensive, priced below $100 USD. The various models come with NO internal storage. The internal firmware is only a bootloader. The user downloads an OS image, burns it to a micro SD card. The image is bootable and the remaining space after the OS is the capacity of the SD card. This is similar to creating a “live” USB for testing a Linux distro, except in this case the image will not be installed to a hard drive. Instead it IS the drive. The CPU is RISC based (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) developed by a company called ARM located in the United Kingdom. The recent releases result in it being a 64 bit processor with 32 bit compatibility as the 32 and 64 bit instruction set is the same. The most recent model is the RPI 4, featuring both USB 2 and USB 3 ports.

**What OS does the RPI 4 run on?

The RPI developers call their OS desktop Pixel. It is based on Linux Debian “Buster” . It is a 32 bit OS. Debian OS upgraded to “Bullseye”. The RPI developers have released a beta 64 bit version lacking a VNC server and VLC.

Are there alternative 64 bit OS’s?

Yes. A few of the major Linux distros have released ARM64 versions including Fedora, Open SUSE, and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu release, IMHO, has the fewest issues. Ubuntu comes in both a server and desktop version. I would recommend the desktop version and install OpenSSH-server if you need to connect with other computers on your LAN.

How reliable is an SD Card for running an OS?

User experience varies but a true hard disk or a flash drive probably can withstand more read/write incidences than an SD card. Realizing that aside from user requested activity, various log files are continually being written, a developer on GitHub released a clever utility called log2ram. This utility creates a ramdisk to which log files are written all but once a day. Theoretically. this will extend the life of an SD. Find it at giyhub.com/azlux/log2ram.

Finally, in the event that our SD card does fail, we need a backup, I have tried several methods including, zipping the home folder, installing deja-dup,, and installing rpi-clone. Zipping my home folder worked well only if I moved any other OS images out of the pi folder. Deja-dup worked nicely until I changed the backup destination. Deja-dup would not forget the original destination even after a re-install with purge! Finally, rpi-clone worked as promised and was faster than the other alternatives. I am sticking with this one . Find it at github.com/billw2/rpi-clone