SBC & BSD

Short version:
- New installation of RaspberryPi Bullseye OS on a RPi Zero 2 W to test out sound and web browsing
- Sound is working fine for live streaming a radio station with the sound out of my monitor's speakers over HDMI.
- I haven't tried playing media on a media player or video in a web browser.
- I haven't tried bluetooth for anything.
- As expected, Chromium is slow to load and run on a Zero 2 W, but actually not painfully slow to load a radio station's website to stream their audio or and fast enough for reading and commenting here on LQ.
- In Bullseye, VLC has replaced OMX.
- The new recommended installer is RPi imager, replacing NOOBS
- Rather than trying to upgrade from Raspbian or an older version of RaspberryPi OS, RPi recommends a clean installation of RPi Bullseye OS.

ref https://raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/os.html (and a bunch of other pages on their website)

Long version:

I just got a RPi Zero 2 W and decided to try installing RPiOS and testing sound with this before trying it on the my RPi4.

I'm posting from Chromium on the Zero 2 W.

I installed the full monty Raspberry Pi Bullseye OS from their website, the one with full desktop and recommended software, a 3 GB download as .zip that decompresses to a 9 GB .img.

I used their RPi imager, their newest replacement for NOOBS.

The installation went smoothly.

Chromium loads and runs slowly, as expected, but I was able to stream live radio. Test case was cfmu.ca playing on my monitor's speakers.

Youtube is unusably slow to load on my Zero 2, so I'm not going to try playing a video.

VLC is now the default media player. OMX is deprecated.

I haven't tried anything with bluetooth, and I'll wait until I get a chance to get Raspberry Pi Bullseye OS on my RPi4 4GB.

business_kid, it seems your advice not to upgrade from an older version is right, both as your experience shows and their own website now recommends.

Although the instructions for upgrading from a previous RPi OS version are still linked from their documentation page, they recommend not doing that but rather installing Bullseye new.

One last thing: did you verify if your hardware is all working properly?

TKS

Originally Posted by fatmac I was about to give FuguIta (OpenBSD) a try yesterday, until I saw it uses a serial console as default - I think I need something that 'just works' these days.

There is an easy step to bypassing using the serial monitor to install and run OpenBSD. I never used a serial monitor, just an HDMI connected monitor.

The time consuming part was the upfront reading and internet searching to find it and to install OpenBSD. I am grateful to the people who did the work to figure that bypass step out and then posted it. Once I got that out of the way, updating and upgrading has been no more time consuming than it is on x86_64.

When I get a chance, I will post the links here.

TKS

Originally Posted by TheTKS business_kid, it seems your advice not to upgrade from an older version is right, both as your experience shows and their own website now recommends. Although the instructions for upgrading from a previous RPi OS version are still linked from their documentation page, they recommend not doing that but rather installing Bullseye new. One last thing: did you verify if your hardware is all working properly?

That makes no sense. The Raspberry lot distribute compacted images, complete with fdisk partition table. Their installer does the job of dd in windows. I verified the hardware is working by installing another
linux OS where of course, sound works.

Originally Posted by business_kid That makes no sense. The Raspberry lot distribute compacted images, complete with fdisk partition table. Their installer does the job of dd in windows. I verified the hardware is working by installing another linux OS where of course, sound works.

I’m missing something in what you said. What is it that you’re saying makes no sense?

RazPi instructions on Installing Bullseye fresh but not updating from Bullseye make no sense. You install one image over another, destroying the old partition table and creating another. This is micro sdcards. It's not an upgrade of packages. To quote Dr. Spock (of Star Trek), it's "illogical."

And sorry about the garbled post. I know what I'm talking about, but not many others do in some cases.

In any case, the advice is wrong. I happened to get new sd cards, and the first thing they saw was Bullseye. That is a fresh install, not an update. Upgrade (sudo apt update; sudo apt -y upgrade) the programs and the sound went in 32 & 64 bit. Don't Upgrade, and it went some time later, sometimes a day, sometimes a week.

Originally Posted by business_kid RazPi instructions on Installing Bullseye fresh but not updating from Bullseye make no sense. You install one image over another, destroying the old partition table and creating another. This is micro sdcards. It's not an upgrade of packages. To quote Dr. Spock (of Star Trek), it's "illogical." And sorry about the garbled post. I know what I'm talking about, but not many others do in some cases. In any case, the advice is wrong. I happened to get new sd cards, and the first thing they saw was Bullseye. That is a fresh install, not an update. Upgrade (sudo apt update; sudo apt -y upgrade) the programs and the sound went in 32 & 64 bit. Don't Upgrade, and it went some time later, sometimes a day, sometimes a week.

business_kid, I think I see where we got our wires crossed. With apologies to fatmac, I’ll make this my last post on this here and then get back to the original topic of BSD on SBCs.

I didn’t make clear what I meant by upgrade, and thought we were talking about the same thing, but I don’t think we were.

I was talking about upgrading from an older OS version. I still have Raspbian (yes, from before they renamed it RaspberryPiOS, but I wrote RasPiOS, which wasn’t accurate) on the sd card I use (rarely) on my RPi4. Buster, I think, maybe Stretch. I should stop using Raspbian and move to RaspberryPiOS Bullseye there. That’s the upgrade I was talking about, but their website recommends not to upgrade in place, instead installing Bullseye anew.

As I understand it now, you were talking about updating and upgrading your Bullseye installation: sudo apt update; sudo apt -y upgrade.

Yours is the bit that could be relevant to fatmac, since he’s running Devuan. If the sound problem originates in Debian Bullseye, it could cause problems in both Devuan Bullseye and RPiOS Bullseye. If sound works well in OpenBSD and not in Debian/Devuan/RPiOS Bullseyes on the RPis, that would be another reason to give OpenBSD a look.

BTW, the website I linked above recommends sudo apt full-upgrade. I didn’t see sudo apt -y upgrade. Are they the same? Website: “Note that full-upgrade is used in preference to a simple upgrade, as it also picks up any dependency changes that may have been made.” Read further about running out of space.

TKS

OK - this morning I have a NetBSD image on a 8GB mSDHC card - I will need to learn how to use NetBSD, as I only ever have had a quick go with it on a regular PC, preferring OpenBSD.

First problem, no wifi.

I will likely have to use a cable to do anything with it, unless it can see one of my usb wifi sticks - minor setback.

I will still try & see if I can get OpenBSD onto another mSDHC card sometime.

(Then I'll need to see if they run from pendrives & external USB drives.)

Originally Posted by TheTKS BTW, the website I linked above recommends sudo apt full-upgrade. I didn’t see sudo apt -y upgrade. Are they the same?

apt full-upgrade does the kernel, firmware, the works. Apt -y means 'presume yes to any stupid questions', so no, they are not the same. But asd Bullseye has just been released, a kernel upgrade is most unlikely. All the .deb packages are stored in /var/cache/apt, so that might be good to go is space is tight. That's after the usual low hanging fruit - caches, temp files, etc.

EDIT: As for booting from usb drives, my understanding is that you need to update the firmware from RazPi OS to get it booting from usb. This is the code in the Broadcom SoC, and is OS-independent. Then it boots sdcard, then usb.

Spent all morning & most of afternoon trying to get wifi working, used their details, someone elses details, & then tried a cable - no connection was possible, there must be something wrong or weird with the way they connect to the internet - just no go!

Also booted the OpenBSD pendrive installer, got some scrolling text, then a dead screen, nothing!

To say the least, I'm disappointed with these BSD for RPi images.

I think I discovered the sense behind Debian's instruction to install anew.

There can be traces of images written confusing the new one. There is even a program /sbin/wipefs to deal with these. Don't ask me how or why, it goes against my gut, but someone obviously thought it worth his while to put his backside on a seat long enough to bang that out.

Originally Posted by fatmac Also booted the OpenBSD pendrive installer, got some scrolling text, then a dead screen, nothing! To say the least, I'm disappointed with these BSD for RPi images.

During installation (and I think the first boot) you have to either connect a serial monitor, or take the couple of steps to be able to see everything on a monitor (via HDMI in my case) through the whole sequence, otherwise - blank screen.

I’ll post the instructions I found when I can get back to my RPi with OpenBSD, as I only saved the instructions there.

TKS

I think I have found the OpenBSD solution. (Not tried yet.)

Boot the OpenBSD installer (serial console NOT required) Boot with hdmi monitor and keyboard attached Press ESC to enter UEFI settings Boot Manager -> Select your USB drive and press ENTER OpenBSD bootloader should start: 'OpenBSD/arm64 BOOTAA64 1.3' QUICKLY Interrupt it with a letter keypress 'asdf etc' Backspace whatever you typed Set the tty to use the framebuffer instead of the serial port: set tty fb0 Thanks Christopher Solskogen: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-arm&m=160683302013161&w=2 Now do a normal OpenBSD install (over the top of the same USB drive if desired). Wifi firmware is missing from the installer so this is easiest with ethernet plugged in for the install. Wifi firmware is automatically installed on first boot if ethernet is available. Set framebuffer as default console (as per Christopher Solskogen's note) echo "set tty fb0" >> /etc/boot.conf Enable X11 rcctl enable xenodm ~~~~~~~~~~~ List: openbsd-arm Subject: Re: RPi 4 UEFI Firmware v1.21 and EEPROM From: Christer Solskogen <christer.solskogen () gmail ! com> Date: 2020-12-01 14:26:38 Message-ID: rq5jqt$54t$1 () ciao ! gmane ! io [Download RAW message or body] On 17.11.2020 04:33, Lee Nelson wrote: > It is claimed that booting entirely from USB without the SD card is > possible with the lastest EEPROM, but I have not tried it yet. > But I have! And it works! What you forgot(?) in your mail is to set tty to fb0 during boot. That way you don't need a serial device at all. I also added "set tty fb0" to /etc/boot.conf After install was complete, I extracted the files from RPi4_UEFI_Firmware_v1.21.zip to the msdos partition. And now it boots without the SD card. ~~~~~~~~~~ Install on Raspberry Pi: As of OpenBSD 6.9, the standard miniroot supports at least the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 with no additional firmware. Some devices may not be functional with Pi 3+. It is recommended that you install to a USB storage device. The default system console is on the TTL serial interface on the TXD/RXD/GND pins of the https://pinout.xyz/ header on the board. It will be helpful to obtain an adapter (e.g. CP2102 USB-UART). If you have one, attach it to the pins and a computer; a command such as "cu -l cuaU0 -s 115200" (assuming cuaU0 is your serial port device) should connect you to the board's console. If not, note that once the kernel has started running, by default you will only see output on the serial console. To switch to displaying on the monitor instead, watch for the OpenBSD BOOTAA64 "boot>" prompt, and type "set tty fb0". Alternatively the system can be booted using UEFI firmware found at https://github.com/pftf/RPi4. Follow their instructions to install to an SD card and run the OpenBSD installer from USB. v1.21 is known to work; some newer versions may have problems. Install on systems without a supported miniroot: If a miniroot is not available for your system you will have to modify an existing image before booting it. To do so first install the u-boot-aarch64 and dtb packages. Write the provided miniroot image to an SD card: dd if=miniroot70.img of=/dev/rsdXc bs=1m Add a board specific DTB file (Allwinner and Rockchip U-Boot images come with a default DTB): mount /dev/sdXi /mnt mkdir /mnt/vendor cp /usr/local/share/dtb/arm64/vendor/board.dtb /mnt/vendor/ umount /mnt ~~~~~~~~~~ https://github.com/AshyIsMe/openbsd-rpi4 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-arm&m=160683302013161&w=2 https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/.../INSTALL.arm64

Originally Posted by fatmac I think I have found the OpenBSD solution. (Not tried yet.)

fatmac, you found the references that I was going to point you to.

That's the way I did it for my RPi4 4GB, and it worked:

- Copying UEFI firmware found at https://github.com/pftf/RPi4 onto a card that goes into the SD slot (I started with v.1.19)

- Installing OpenBSD onto something pluggable into a USB port. I use an SD card in an SD-USB adaptor, but I've read of other people using SSDs.

I haven't taken the next step of "extracted the files from RPi4_UEFI_Firmware_v1.21.zip to the msdos partition" to boot without the SD card.

One caveat: some time after getting this working, I started having problems booting. That was solved by re-extracting the UEFI firmware onto the boot SD card. I'm now booting with v.1.3something. I don't know if the cause was boot files getting corrupted, or maybe replaced since I alternate between running Slackware and OpenBSD on the same RPi4, but since that 2 minute fix/workaround, it hasn't happened to me again.

Since you mentioned wanting to use your RPi as a movie/music player: the last time I checked, OpenBSD didn't support Bluetooth, so if that is part of your entertainment setup then OpenBSD won't be suitable as is, so check if BT support is coming or if you can get a BT USB dongle, if such a thing exists. No idea - I network mine wired mostly, occasionally wifi, never BT.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

TKS

Many thanks for confirming; hope to give it a try through the week; & yes, I'll be back posting my thoughts.


By the way, if HDMI doesn't have sound, I'm happy enough to use external wired speakers.