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Re: Last slice of Pi for 2020



Nice meeting. 

Alex (correct me if I remember the wrong name) asked about the raspberry pi 400. 
So I trotted out mine and did screen share on jitsi.  It is a very nice little machine.  Same as the Pi 4. 
I still find the design choices strange though.  
- built into a kid style keyboard but no built in pointing device. 
- micro hdmi ports.  Full size port makes more sense. For a grab and go computer. You are more likely to have full size hdmi cable than micro to full. 
- gpio on the back.  I haven't tried on mine but evidently they fit pointing up facing backwards. But I feel that for experimenting you'd want it on top of in front. 

Alex was interested in making it an htpc. For that the 400 is a decent choice. Considering the Pi 4 is $55 and a passively cooled case for $15, 
you are right up to $70 for the Pi 400. (Well if you can find one in stock.)  

Otherwise I talked about the ssd upgrade on my Thinkpad T440.  It has a small 16GB ssd (originally an Intel cache) and 500GB hdd. 
Ssd has / partition and EFI mounted at /boot. Hdd has /home.  
I mentioned this on the SFLug meeting.  My idea was to just copy the contents of the ssd to a backup folder on /home.  Then I would swap 
the drive and copy everything back.  
So like cp -a / /home/root_backup and cp -a /boot /home/boot_backup
For cp the -a flag keeps the same permissions in the copy.  
But I wanted to avoid creating an infinite loop (copying /home into itself) 
The -x flag does this.  
man cp
 -x, --one-file-system
              stay on this file system

It also prevents copying the special folders like /proc 
Turned out the T440 has two M.2 slots (well 3 including the WIFI card)  So 
I have both ssd installed .  I booted the Arch iso but and just copied directly (maybe I could have just booted from the old ssd.)  
Create efi partition and main on the new ssd.
Mount new partitions to /mnt (main one to /mnt and the efi to /mnt/boot) 
Copy cp -ax / /mnt and cp -ax /boot /mnt/boot 
   -- That second command was wrong. It made /mnt/boot/boot instead of /mnt/boot 
   -- At first I thought cp acted like rsync where trailing / will make it do what I want 
   -- No combination of trailing / worked so I just cp -ax /boot/* /mnt/boot.  
   -- Michael said that you can do this:  cd /boot then cp -ax . /mnt/boot
Edit /mnt/etc/fstab with the new partitions UUID's
Then chroot to /mnt and do pacman -Syu which installed the new kernel and generated new initramfs.  
efibootmgr to delete the old boot entry and create the new one (Arch Linux booting by efistub)  
  -- had trouble here because I kept making typos.  In the Arch wiki they have you pass the location 
      of the initramfs to the kernel in the efi boot entry.  For that you use the partition UUID.  
  -- Then I thought If I could copy and paste the UUID?  But booted the Arch iso I don't have a mouse.  
  -- So couldn't see how to do it in bash, but screen has a copy paste mode.  In screen the paste was giving me 
     extra lines.  Michael showed in the Jitsi that is worked perfectly for him.  

Thomas


On Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 8:06 PM tom r lopes <tomrlopes@gmail.com> wrote:
Berkeley Raspberry Pi meeting this coming Sunday 12.20.20 

Meeting Details: 

11 am to ? 

tom is inviting you to a meeting.

Join the meeting:
https://meet.jit.si/Pi.BerkeleyLUG

To join by phone instead, tap this: +1.512.647.1431,,3314091209#

Looking for a different dial-in number?
See meeting dial-in numbers: https://meet.jit.si/static/dialInInfo.html?room=Pi.BerkeleyLUG


If also dialing-in through a room phone, join without connecting to audio: https://meet.jit.si/Pi.BerkeleyLUG#config.startSilent=true


So I have the Raspberry Pi 400.   Went with the official kit, as the stand alone is sold out 
everywhere.  
My review:  Kit contains the Pi 400 (a Pi 4 like computer built into a keyboard), USB C power supply, mouse, HDMI cable and microsd with Raspberry Pi OS.  Oh and a booklet that I haven't looked at.  (I rarely look at manuals anyways But I'm guessing it is a project book)  
Actually having it in my hands I am wondering why the pointing device wasn't integrated.  Having to hang a mouse off it seems to violate the whole integration theme with the keyboard and all.  
The other thing that I found strange is the micro-hdmi ports.  I didn't like it on the Pi 4 because I thought it went against the Pi being a grab n go device.  You know, like now you have to have a special cable.  With the Pi 4 you can understand that there is not enough space for 2 full size HDMI so you need to go micro to get dual display.  But the Pi 400 is big enough that they could have gone with full size ports.  
Other than that is a Pi 4 and so performs the same.  

Thomas 

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