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A comment on I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix them. Parent comment

Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by johndoe0815 on Saturday January 23, 2021 @03:36PM (#25885815)
The Raspberry Pi 1 is still a great device to experiment with alternative operating systems, most of which are far less resource hungry than Linux:

- Plan 9 (http://9p.io/sources/contrib/miller/)

- Inferno (http://lynxline.com/projects/labs-portintg-inferno-os-to-ras...)

- RISC OS (https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi)

- NetBSD (https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/)

- FreeBSD (https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi)

- Interim Lisp OS (http://interim-os.com - this runs on Raspi 2 only, so porting to the ARM v6 in the Raspi 1 would be a nice project) - btw., this is a project by Lukas Hartmann, who is also the creator of the open MNT Reform ARM laptop (https://mntre.com)

- (shameless plug) my bare metal "crosstalk" Smalltalk-80 (https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk)

I'm pretty sure this list isn't complete...

Some operating systems are not supported at the moment:

- OpenBSD only seems to support the Aarch64-based models 3 and 4

- Haiku seems to be looking for a maintainer for the Raspberry port

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Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by smorrow on Saturday January 23, 2021 @05:41PM (#25886825)
Let me just add 9front even though you already said Plan 9.
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Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by na85 on Saturday January 23, 2021 @06:55PM (#25887324)
Do any of those operating systems have particularly good support for messing around with the GPIO ports?
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Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by aarchi on Saturday January 23, 2021 @09:47PM (#25888591)
That would be an interesting project for a university operating systems class.
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Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by sagarm on Saturday January 23, 2021 @04:24PM (#25886240)
Isn't a VM just as good and more convenient, though?
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Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by kroltan on Saturday January 23, 2021 @06:56PM (#25887333)
Not who you asked, but there is something amusing about fiddling with a physical system, plus you can keep it on regardless of your main computer, and doesn't take up a window/tty/otherwise clutter the host.
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Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by meekrohprocess on Saturday January 23, 2021 @07:35PM (#25887583)
Maybe, but try to get into the mind of someone who installs a minimalist OS. They might think that Linux is too heavy and an RTOS is too constrained, right?

That kind of perspective probably wants to be fairly close to the metal, and virtualization is a sizable abstraction layer.

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Re:I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix ... by spicybright on Saturday January 23, 2021 @07:05PM (#25887393)
Yes, unless you want to play with peripherals too.

Like another commenter said, being able to put it on a shelf is nice. You can crack it open 5 years down the line to play with, or just give it to a friend that's interested in trying different OS's

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