On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 18:21 Casey Bralla via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
Wow! I'm a longtime Raspberry Pi user and fan, but my recent experience
makes me wonder what the heck is up with those guys over in Jolly Ol'
England.
I've got several old Pi Model A's lying around, and a bunch of old Dell
flat monitors. So I thought, why not make nice Digital Clocks out of
them? Can't be too hard. I wrote the enclosed python-tkinter script to
show the time and date in a clean display.
I downloaded the latest Raspbian and put it on a (full-sized!) SD card.
Then the fun started...
Lots of problems.
- System wouldn't even finish booting. The initial setup program
appears on Screen 8, so the install hangs. I was able to eventually
google enough to find that I could Alt-F8 to get to the initial setup
screen.
- Kicking the system into graphics mode meant it would never return
to text mode, even if X was killed.
- Simple things like setting static IP didn't work. I've done this
dozens of times on stock Debian systems, but sometimes
/etc/network/interfaces was simply ignored. Was it NetManager? Never
did find out.
- The python tkinter script wouldn't run. No error messages; it
just didn't run. Except it did kick the system into graphics mode, from
which it would not exit back to text without a hard reboot.
I tried lots of troubleshooting things. I've got 10+ years experience
with Debian, but I was stumped. Tried several Model A's, and even a
Model 3B+, but still had issues. Tried bookworm (Debian 12) as well as
Bullseye (Debian 11), but got similar problems. Threw away an SD card
and tried several others. No go.
Finally, I tried loading it on an old Odroid C2 loaded with Ubuntu 20.04
(the most recent system available), and it "Just Worked!".
Something is seriously wrong with Raspbian on the Pi, or I've turned
into a flippin' idiot in my retirement.
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug