[tde-users] Re: Another stupid question. Two, actually.

said David C. Rankin via tde-users: | The Pi 4 and 5 are on my get to list. I've also used a number of TI | boards and the Milkv-Duo which runs busybox as the OS (RISC based). It | is the same format/size as the Pico but with 64M DDR2 RAM (verses 2M for | the Pico). The Zero 2 W comes with 512M and runs full Debian fine (don't | load firefox or chromium -- they run, but s l o w l y.... The LXDE (or | LXQt - whatever it is) desktop also works fine -- but I run mine | headless. I got two RPi boards when Roku really pissed me off -- I read their terms of data gathering -- so I wanted to make my own TV boxen, using the big, nice TCL TV as a dumb terminal but for its HDMI switching, which is excellent and can be controlled by the remote on the hifi. It has been a hoot, in many ways. First, it's one click to be rid of Wayland and back to X11. Second, it runs TDE perfectly, even though I'm not using most of its features (though they're handy to have). Third, the latest version of ProtonVPN is architecture agnostic as far as I can tell. This means that if's running the very cool IPTVnator and want to watch something that's geoblocked, no problem, I just emerge in a favored country. This is especially useful when the world is exploding. Fourth, though I had to make a couple of little changes, orincipally yanking out pipewire and stomping it to atoms, and the Hauppauge dongle works just fine with Kaffeine, ao I have all the local stations. And all without a bit of it going back to Roku (which I assured by taking away all its network privileges and, to be sure, changing the router password). Upstairs, I got a $150 32-inch ONN computer monitor that works better than I expected with the RPi. Configuring it required taking the micro SD card from the one downstairs and using the built-in utility to copy it to the SSD on that Pi. The one annoyance was/is that it has two HDMI ports; one goes just fine to the monitor, and I figured I could get sound by hooking the other to a soundbar. Nope, silence from the soundbar. So I've had to use Bluetooth, which I don;t like for philosophical reasons -- why use wireless for a distance of three feet -- and practical ones -- the first Bluetooth channel is really noisy, so upon reboot I have to disconnect and reconnect to get onto the second one, which is okay. (The monitor speakers have worse audio quality than some cat's whisker crystal radios I've built.) Even so, they are far and away the best TVs I've ever owned, when controlled by the RPis. | I look forward to your book -- we've all held the wrong drive in the | hand once or twice. I was fortunate not to have to worry about | hot-swapping in the early days, nothing I had had it. I've got two | SuperMicro boxes (a 4U and 2U) that do have hot-swap back-planes for | SAS/SATA drives -- that will spoil you. Simply grab the caddy and yank | -- while the box is running. That indeed is a neat trick :) The book was a ghost job for a fairly famous author, and appeared in 1990 (and disappeared quickly thereafter). Mine weren't the only disasters involved, which included the titular author dying right after it was released. But it was a book, and my name is inside it in the acks, so I'm content. You're definitiely running a far more elaborate rig than mine. The closest to networking here is everything running off the same router. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/