Raspberry Pi 400 - the Most Significant Computer in 2020

Is that a click-bait title?!
I don't think so. While Raspberry Pis were doing well over the years. There never was an attempt to creating a breakthrough by the RPi-foundation. At least that's my thought on things. 
Personally, I was never really attracted to their devices, until the RPi3B+ was released. Now we are talking. Not perfect yet, however, the device was boot-able over USB and with 1GB of RAM, this has beaten many of my previous Linux machines.

With the RPi 4 coming in, the game changed. Now we are talking about a tiny computer that boots from USB3, adding the speed needed for real computing.
In fact, I used a RPi4-8GB in a 64bit computing environment successfully.

The before mentioned setup required some pain and suffering to set up, in particular choosing the 64bit OS that supports the 8GB. So, is that what I would recommend to others? No it is not, only if you know your ways around Linux and stuff. Many of the amenities you get with a 32bit Raspberry Pi OS wont be there. Lets wait and see how the 64bit Raspberry Pi OS will perform, once it left the beta stage.

So, what the fuzz about the RPi 400 then? Well, it is not much of an improvement over the RPi4 to be honest. However, having the only choice of a 4GB version eliminates the need for a 64bit OS. Consequently, the Raspberry Pi OS is all you might want to use.
And that is what I am running on my machine, which I actually use for business, believe it or not. I wished the keyboard was a little bit better, but for the rest, the RPi 400 does a fine job.

To add something technical here, I did overclock my RPi 400 to 2.1GHz by adding the following lines to the file /boot/config.txt (I left the original comment line for reference): 

#uncomment to overclock the arm. 700 MHz is the default.
over_voltage=6
arm_freq=2100
gpu_freq=750

And here we go, this change makes the RPi 400 just a little bit snappier.

Here is another suggestion I got for you: install zram-tools. This will setup virtual swap space using compression in RAM rather than real disk/SSD-space. With 4 cores and 4GB of RAM, zram-tools will provide 1GB of virtual swap. This may not sound like much, however, once you hit the memory ceiling, you will see that this is a really good tool, in particular with higher clock speeds.

Should you consider using the RPi 400 as a daily driver, I highly recommend using an SSD on one of the USB3 ports. Further, a (powered) USB(3) hub will help to add devices you would regularly use for daily work, such as a scanner.

Writing about scanners, I am using an old Canon LIDE 30 with great success on an even older powered USB hub. To be honest, before using those things with the RPi 400, I considered discarding those devices, due to a lack of drivers on OS other than Linux.

And the best thing about the RPi 400, it is passively cooled. As long as you are not using a mechanical HDD with the device, you got a totally silent working environment, which to me means a lot.

 

Raspberry Pi OS on USB

Lately, for various reasons, I got into using Raspberry Pis, in particular in combination with the GPIO.
What puts me off by a bit is the fact that the regular RPis used (micro) SD cards. While reading from an SD card might not be that bad, but writing to it, over and over again, will destroy over a short period of time. Thereby destroying the data you stored on it.

For my projects, therefore, another solution had to be found.

In this series of posts, I will document my experiences using various methods and devices to avoid the wear and tear of an SD card.

This first episode reflects on using BerryBoot to boot from and load the OS from USB connected devices.

Using and installing BerryBoot is very simple. Download the archive provided in the above mention link. Make sure you picked the file that fits your Raspberry Pi. 
During writing this article, it appears that the BerryBoot image now changed to a single archive for all variants of the RPi. I have not tested this, since I just a few hours prior to the writing of this post, downloaded the archive for Pi0 to Pi3+ boards.
Anyway, I stick with what I have and what worked for me earlier.

In my present test, I am using a Raspberry Pi 1 B+ with a 2GB micro-SD card as a boot device and a USB-2 HDD enclosure with a 320GB 3.5" hard-disk. The enclosure came with a 2TB disk, which is used in something else by now.
Further, the enclosure is powered externally by a 12V wall-ward. This, of course, is important, since a Raspberry Pi would never be able to provide the power for any HDD.

Following the procedure as set out on the BerryBoot page, an OS will be written to the USB attached device. I opted for a full install of Raspberry Pi OS, as it is presently called.
After having booted "into" the HDD, the experience is certainly less snappy, compared to running the OS from the SD card. However, the mere difference is storage space should put up some questions: 8GB SD card vs. 320GB HDD.
Initially, no swap space was created. So, I decided for creating a swap-file on the root directory of the hard-drive. That did not work. It appears that under BerryBoot, using a swap file is impossible.

A solution to the missing swap-file is to install zram-tools, which will enable a virtual swap into compressed memory.

In following posts, I will discuss various other options for booting a Raspberry Pi from USB devices.

As-Easy-As spreadsheet legally for free

One of the most popular office tools are certainly spreadsheet calculators.
Lotus 1-2-3 was certainly one of the most popular programs. Some versions of 1-2-3 are apparently available as abandonware, maybe I will some of those later.
There were, however, alternatives programs to Lotus 1-2-3. One of the shareware options was As-Easy-As.

The owner of As-Easy-As, TRIUS Inc., decided to release the DOS version of their spreadsheet by providing the necessary codes.
Here is a link to TRIUS Inc's very own forum post on their forum page, providing downloads for the program and the user manual, as well as license codes for the DOS version of As-Easy-As and the respective documentation for free!

Please note that the codes for the program and the manual are different.

MS WORD for DOS

Having a word processor on your FreeDOS machine is certainly a very important issue. Former DOS users might still have a box of floppies containing once purchased programs.

In case you are not so lucky, or you could not be bothered keeping obsolete stuff, sometimes on get lucky, very lucky indeed.

Searching the internet about ways to legally obtain old DOS programs, here is a gem: MS WORD directly from Microsoft:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe

The file is a PKSFX archive which self-extracts to the active directory. It creates a bunch of EX$, CS$, PR$ and so forth files. Some of the printer driver files appear to have long names, since I am not running DOSLFN.COM, I got a few warnings.

SETUP.EXE lets you install Microsoft Word 5.5A for DOS on your HDD in a directory of your liking. Nothing to report about that process, other than to manually edit the PATH settings in FDAUTO.BAT yourself, since the installer modifies AUTOEXEC.BAT, which is not relevant in FreeDOS.

Text and VGA modes work perfectly fine. Playing with both, I settled on using the graphics mode with 30 lines and 80 columns. 34 lines looked still OK on the screen, so maybe I will switch to that later. 43 lines looks pretty painful and 60 lines, while still working fine, feels pretty squeezed and unnatural.

Concerning printing, I mentioned the problem with the long file names before. I no longer have any of those printers. In order to have something for WORD to think about concerning fonts, I chose the POSTSCRIPT driver.
However, printing is not my main objective using the netbook on FreeDOS. I will create files, e.g. DOC, which will then be transferred to the cloud and used as such. Another option would be to write Postscript files and convert those in PDF.

Hardware to run FreeDOS

In my earlier post, I stated that I intended to run FreeDOS directly on bare hardware, meaning, without virtualization.

Using the FreeDOS 1.3 Live CD, I tried a different systems at my disposal. Most modern ones failed, one way or the other.

An IBM 380Z laptop booted the CD fine, however, only the center of the screen was used. The system would work, however, the experience would be disappointing since the real estate of the screen is severely underused. The mouse-nipple, or however the red thing in the middle of the keyboard is called, worked find under FreeDOS.

My HP/Compaq nx6110 booted the live CD fine, screen fully used. The touchpad did what it was supposed to do, right away. This could be the perfect candidate for running FreeDOS on bare silicon. However, this laptop is my goto-PC for Debian/LINUX. So, for now. FreeDOS will live in qemu on this one.

Actually, the first hardware I tried FreeDOS on was one of my Acer ASPIRE ONE 110 netbooks. One that I had given an HDD years ago. Here is a link to a post on my RF related blog, concerning the HDD in the Aspire ONE netbook. To the time, I had not thought about an IT related blog, so, it was called "off-topic", seen the radio-frequency electronics content of my other blog.

Here is the netbook during the install of OpenWatcom FORTRAN on FreeDOS.

Acer ASPIRE ONE 110

The install files are on the USB thumb-drive on the right hand side of the netbook.
While the device is equipped with Ethernet, I had not set up or tested networking by the time of writing this post.
The touchpad on the Acer does not work with FreeDOS yet. I tried various options with the USB-mouse-driver, all of the attempts ended in crashes.

As a pure DOS computer, the netbook does a great job.
Several programming languages are available, through the FreeDOS-CD and also by installation using the USB thumb-drive and a USB floppy drive.
My old DOS version of Maple V runs just fine and so does a MathCAD student edition I happen to own.

Unfortunately, the Aspire ONE does is not fully supported in FreeDOS what APM is concerned. However, dictating processor speed does work fine.
I created the following aliases in fdauto.bat

alias slow=fdapm speed1
alias fast=fdapm speed8

Those commands set the processor speed to 1/8 and 8/8 (full) processor speed. In the case of the Aspire ONE, the native processor speed is 1.6GHz. Running the netbook at 1/8th of that, will still deliver a very decent 200MHz. This is plenty of fast for a DOS computer.

In fact, when editing code, I set my netbook to run at lowest speed. Only when I compile and run my programs, I will ramp the CPU up to max.

In conclusion, the Acer ASPIRE ONE 110 is the perfect DOS machine, I never was able to dream about.
In my nest post, I will compare the ASPIRE ONE to machines of that past, which I still own today.

Down Sizing My Computing

Most likely, I am not the only one who noticed that it is rarely a necessity to maintain high power computing equipment at home. For me, the last resort for this sort of demand would be video editing.
Most of my photo editing is done in the cloud by now, either by moving a finger across the screen of my phone of with the aid of Chromebooks.
While my Chromebooks do a great job, for some applications, I wished to have some other tools available.
So, after a longer struggle, I finally decided to "invest" in a Raspberry Pi. That decision came when I learned that there a at least 2 ways to boot the Pi from USB HDDs. Why is that important, I hear you thinking. Well, first of all I still got a bunch of spinning HDD in my scrap-box, and secondly, SD cards are certainly not the fastest medium in the world what read and write speeds are concerned, but they are the fastest storage medium in the world to wear out. Seen the RAM limitation of a Raspberry Pi, my regular use will heavily rely on swap, resulting in the foreseeable death of many SD cards in the near future.
While my Chromebooks wont be replaced any time soon, the FX-6100 and i7 4770k workstations will see a lot less work soon.
Presently there is a Pi 1 B+ and Pi 3 B+ in my possession.
My junk box further comprises a lot of old USB stuff, e.g. powered hubs, WiFi dongles, sound dongles, etc. So, there are a lot of options to build system around Raspberry Pi boards by recycling obsolete stuff. How exciting!