Thursday, April 28, 2022

Decisions, Decisions (Raspberry Pi 4 Edition)

I'm still happy with my Raspberry Pi 4, running the 32-bit Raspbian "Buster" OS.

But the machine has 8Gb of RAM and a 64-bit processor, and more and more I'm looking forward to upgrading to a 64-bit OS (which, among other things can address more of that RAM; also a lot of software only comes in 64-bit versions these days).

When I got this machine, the 64-bit version of Raspbian wasn't in stable release. Apparently it is now. Or there are some other 64-bit ARM Linux distributions to choose from. But I like Raspbian, so I'd rather stick with it.

However, upgrading in situ seems complex at best and maybe even impossible. So I'll just do it from scratch -- buy a new micro SD card and write the image to it, then swap it out for the old one.

Up side: If something goes wrong, I just pop the old one card back in, stay 32-bit, and give the new card to Tamara to store photos on or whatever.

Second up side: The machine came with a 128Gb micro SD card. I don't use a whole lot of storage, but while I'm at it I might as well boost that side of things to 256Gb.

I'm not undecided -- I'm going to do this sooner or later -- but there's also no hurry. I'll probably wait until one of two things happens: I get an Amazon gift card from Bing Rewards or for completing YouGov surveys, or someone wants to see how this comes out badly enough to hit my Amazon Wish List and make it so.

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