By contrast, it is butter smooth on the Rapsberry Pi 4, which surprised me very positively. My QNAP NAS also struggles with it and fails to run smoothly. That is something that never quite worked well with the old ZOTAC HTPC presumably due to it being underpowered. HTPCĪs I planned to hook it up to my TV and use it as an HTPC, one of the first things I installed is Kodi (18.9 Leia). All in all, it is a pretty neat experience, and it feels polished. There is also a CLI tool, raspi-config, which has some more depth to it, and adds controls to turn on/off the compositor, choose the amount of memory dedicated to the GPU or enabling pixel doubling for HiDPI displays. It has a nice GUI configuration tool (‘Raspberry Pi configuration’) from which you can perform certain system administration tasks like setting up auto-login, choosing the look-and-feel, activating certain services ( ssh, nfs, etc.) or activating and setting the parameters of the official fan (if you have it). Raspbian (the Raspberry Pi OS) seems to be a modified Debian with some additional, pi-specific packages-an additional repository, really. At this point you may want to run an update and an upgrade to make sure you’re up to date, so fire up a terminal and do: Wait for the system to boot and then you are presented with a fairly typical set of setup dialogs (locale, password, etc.) to get your system ready. Now, once your card is flashed, connect the power supply to the Pi and that will turn it on. In case you are starting with a blank card, you can find an awesome setup guide on the official site. In my case, the Micro SD card came already flashed with Raspbian, so I just had to slide it into the card reader and do the software setup. Everything is easy and pleasant to configure, and it is a joy to use. The system is also trivial to set up, and this seems to be a pattern that repeats over and over when it comes to this little device. Now it just stops randomly with sounds from Hell. Tonight it was making some unusually high pitches and whines in an erratic pattern. Three days after delivery the little fan has died on me. I connected the fan to the 3.3v pin of the GPIO, as in my tests it provided sufficient cooling (idles at 35C, goes up to ~40 when playing video), and connecting it to the 5v pin resulted in an unbearably high fan noise. The latter reduces the noise to an almost inaudible whine, but the cooling capability is also capped. The former results in a louder noise but more air flow and better cooling. You can connect the fan to either the 5v pin or the 3.3v pin of the GPIO. Now you are ready to plug it in and set up raspbian, the Debian-based default Operating System for the Rasbperry Pi. Just drop the Pi in the case, apply the heat sinks, screw the fan to the top lid and close the box. The thing itself is very straightforward to set up. The kit I got contains the Raspberry Pi 4b (4 GB version), a cheap plastic case, a noisy little fan (30x30x7 mm) with screws, three heat sinks (one for the GPU/CPU, one for the RAM module and the last for the USB controller unit), an HDMI cable, a power supply and a 64 GB microSD card with raspbian pre-installed. In this post I dump my first impressions of the little thing after a couple of days of tinkering. Finally, emboldened by its low price point, I bit the bullet and got a NinkBox Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB) kit which comes with a 64 GB SD card, a power supply, an HDMI cable and a case with a fan and three heat sinks. I have been interested in the Pi since its inception, following its developments and the various versions with mild curiosity. It is in this last category that we find the Raspberry Pi. In my crusade to find the perfect replacement, I have considered recent off-the-shelf HTPCs, options with a Mini PC form factor like the intel NUCs, and some of the affordable single-board computers. The ZOTAC still works, mind you, but it has become slow, loud and it takes ages to boot Arch Linux. Thus, I set out to find a worthy successor to act as a squire to my TV. In the last months, chimp, my old 2013 ZOTAC ZBOX ID42 HTPC, has been struggling more and more to decode and transcode high-resolution video on the fly, especially when encoded in H.265/HEVC.
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