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by beezischillin 1691 days ago
The Pi4 is an amazing piece of hardware. While relying on sd cards is a sure way to get a disappointing surprise, they now support booting off a USB drive, which is amazing. Couple it with even a sata ssd and a USB adapter and you’ll be amazed how fired up it becomes. A Linux without a GUI boots in mere seconds. My biggest complaint really is the availability, especially now. I had to buy one of those mini Intel Atom PCs because I just couldn’t find a Pi4 anymore at a reasonable price.

I run an invoicing tool off mine, PiHole, NextCloud, UPS monitoring and HomeAssistant to control lights and heating in my home.

I have one serving as a controller and monitoring server for my 3D printer that I turned into a chunky little tablet with a 7” touchscreen and OctoPrint.

And another one for backups at the office.
3 comments
handrous 1691 days ago
> A Linux without a GUI boots in mere seconds.

IIRC Lakka (a Linux that boots straight into Retroarch, based on the same micro-distro Kodi uses, I think) is booted and interactive, with a GUI, in like 2-3 seconds. I think it's using direct rendering to achieve that, though, not X or Wayland.

[EDIT] And that's off an SDCard.

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beezischillin 1691 days ago
I should’ve been more specific! I meant Raspbian Lite :) That one certainly doesn’t boot in seconds off an SD card.
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handrous 1691 days ago
Right, I wasn't trying to one-up you, and a "full" Linux distro of any kind will take longer than that, just pointing out that the bottleneck is not the hardware. The thing can boot really fast.
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beezischillin 1691 days ago
Oh, don't worry, I assumed that you weren't, I just realised that I wasn't too specific so I just specified it. Sorry if I accidentally implied that you were, I wasn't trying to.

Still, I learned about micro-distros which was quite an interesting thing to discover :) I might try and mess around with some on the Pi Zero I have to see if I can figure out a cool use for something like that.

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noodlesUK 1691 days ago
What’s the invoicing tool you are using?
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beezischillin 1691 days ago
It’s a small Laravel app my friend wrote for himself and shared with me.

Tom Lawrence (YouTuber who makes networking related videos) uses the open source one called InvoiceNinja. Apparently it’s pretty good!

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Havoc 1690 days ago
Want to try pxe boot instead of buying 3x crappy ssd but haven’t gotten round to it yet. In theory that should sidestep the SD card issue
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