Hi.
I recently purchased a Pi4 from CE. Loving it.
I have two probs with the keyboard. It’s a great little (but not too little) keyboard but…
The “x” key doesn’t work well. I have to press it firmly at just the right spot. Not good.
Second, the red “Fn” shift key doesn’t work at all with the numerical keypad. It works with the punctuation keys (* - + / ) and the cursor control keys, but not with the numerals 0-9 and the decimal point.
I bought the HDMI cable but am not using it as it has a plug at both ends. My monitor does not have a matching socket and my old monitor cable has a plug at the other end. I bought a micro (plug) to normal HDMI (socket) adapter so I cud use my old cable.
Mouse is really nice. I like the short cable – it doesn’t have far to reach.
Installing the OS was not especially easy. More support is needed here. I installed it four times to get where I want to be.
Thanks for a great product and great delivery (6 days).
I’m using it as my desktop/portable PC.
John.
My guess would be that the The numeric pad functions my not be mapped into the Pi OS correctly so is does not know what they are.
The x key thing sounds a bit annoying, If you can have a look and see maybe some packing material got caught under it or something.
Sorry to hear about your issues with the OS install, could you let us know where you ran into problems so we can better address those issues.
Hi Clinton.
Re the OS options.
There seems to be four options for installing Raspbian Buster:
. NOOBS
. Raspbian Lite
. Raspbian with desktop and recommended software
. Raspbian with desktop
Being new to RPi and Linu, the differences b/w the options was not clear.
Lite is a command line interface only, so I didn’t want that.
NOOBS? What is it? What eactly do you end up with after “installing” it? Should it really be the recommended option for “beginners”? I’m not sure embarking on a Linu computer is a venture suited to a “beginner”.
Raspbian with desktop and recommended software sounded like a good option. I installed it and found it included thousands of files I’m sure I would never use. Uninstalling them did not look like a quick process. One of the reasons I want to leave Windows is to be in control of what is installed.
I finally installed Raspbian with desktop only. This is half the size and no games and multimedia programs. Lovely. Doesn’t include the Libre Office suite which I do want but I epect I can install those at my convenience.
Unzipping the download and burning the image wasn’t eactly intuitive and there were failures, but I got there.
I think it’s good practice to install the OS more than once to get the hang of it – I want to be able to reinstall the OS any time the PC gets overburdened with unwanted s/w or becomes slow (another reason to leave Windows).
So, I feel there’s a need to guide folks in selecting the most appropriate OS for their wants. I’m not keen on the simplistic notion of: “beginners use NOOBS”. Perhaps it would help to specify the skills needed to achieve the install. It’s not terribly hard, but also not terribly simple.
John.
P.S., please ecuse the missing x’s.
NOOBS isn’t an operating system. It is an installer that lets you select from a number of operating systems, and then installs the selected operating system.
Choice of keyboard is usually done as part of the initial OS install, as part of machine setup, along with country, language, timezone etc. Was this in this thread?
The (newish) Raspberry Pi Imager is pretty simple to use, and will burn a selected image from the supported list (and download it) or let you use a local image from whatever distribution you decided to use.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/
Having too many packages installed should only be a problem if you’re short on storage. Just because the C language compiler is installed doesn’t mean you have to suddenly start writing everything in C (or Algol or Fortran or python)
Pick a distro that can, out of the box, do what you need. Then use it and get familiar with it, and the tools to maintain and administer it. Then you can start build you own lean mean Linux machine.
Hope this helps a little.
One other thing that might be pertinent:
There is/was a problem with buster that locale/keyboard aren’t set correctly. To manually change the keyboard
sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
Then
sudo shutdown -r now
