ARM edition return?

Now that ARM based laptops/machines are about to flood the market thanks to SnapDragon, what are your thoughts on the future of EOS and ARM. I know it was recently shelved due to the amount of work to maintain it but maybe now there is more of an incentive to reinvest in it?

Disclaimer: I know nothing of this, I am not involved, I will just write my personal opinion based on what I have read:

This is not an issue of missing incentive - without resource there is nothing to invest.
Nevertheless there is hope, due to upstream changes.

We are working on a new installation process to replace Calamares. Having Calamares running on a working Plasma DE was just too cumbersome for ARM devices.

The new install will utilize a script that does not require any Desktop Environment or Window manager. This will simplify the maintenance of creating images.

We will also no longer offer a rootfs tar image. The only advantage of the rootfs tar image over a straight up image was having the choice to run on btrfs. This will reduce the number of images to maintain down to 5 instead of 10.

Here are the newest images if anyone wants to install EnOS on a RPi 4b, RPi 5b, Odroid N2, or pinebook pro and see what the new installer is like. Anyone is free to utilize what we are calling the Beta images. Feel free to feedback any suggestions, etc. Any help will be appreciated. Known problems are listed with each image, mostly involving Wayland.

Read the README.md for instructions on downloading and installation. Then click on the
“Releases” button on the Right side. It should turn blue when the cursor is hovered over it.

Any comments on the process of using a very KISS script are appreciated.

Pudge

EDIT: Forgot that the installer should also work on RPi 400.

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I love it when I am wrong :smiley:

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This is awesome news! Thanks for sharing. I’ll give the new installer a go on my Pi 5 tonight.

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Thank you for doing some testing. Let us know the results. DE, opinions, etc.

Pudge

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Might be a dumb question but is the RPi 5b just the regular 5?

The way I understand it, the 5 is the version, and the b is the model.

Raspberry PI is like Chevrolet, the 5 is like Camaro, and b is like Z28.
There is also Raspberry Pi 400, Raspberry Pi Zero, and others.

As i understand it, Model a is the hardware release sent to certain developers for testing, developing software, etc. Model b is the first hardware released to the consumers.

An interesting tid bit:

Obsolescence Statement

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B will remain in production until at least January 2034

Pudge

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Okay, good to know. AFAICT there’s only one model you can buy right now (4 or 8g)

Correct, I highly recommend 8 GB RAM. Most places are selling the 4 GB RAM model for $60 USD and 8 GB RAM model for $80 USD. So it is only $20 difference.

I also highly recommend the following heat sink.

There is also an identical looking version for the RPi 4, so be careful to get the correct one.
Here is a picture of my RPi 5 running off an external USB 3 250 GB SSD.

RPi5

Pudge

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Alright, I’m sold. Two questions

  1. For the installer, why not do a curses style one like Void? I think they’re easy, straight forward and look cool

  2. Are the ARM releases signed? I only see a hash file. I would rather verify a sig if possible

The new installer is a curses style.

No, just the sha512sum.

Pudge

Set up with the latest image (pi 5 8gb, i3wm). Everything’s working perfectly! :slight_smile:

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Great, glad to here it. Thanks for the feedback.

How well did the installer work for you. Was the ncurses dialog windows OK or too confusing? If you have the time, give a review of the new installer.

Pudge

I found it very straightforward, on par with a netinstall of Debian. The only difficulty I had was not being able to change the scaling (it defaulted to my display’s 4k resolution).

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I think the default I have for resolution is ‘display_auto_detect=1’ in the /boot/config.txt

Pudge

EDIT:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/config_txt.html

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Good to know! That’s a pretty straightforward solution (via the config file)

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