Episode: 3032
Title: HPR3032: piCore on a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3032/hpr3032.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:27:38

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3032 for Tuesday, 17 March 2020.
Today's show is entitled Pie Core on a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B. It is hosted by Claudio Miranda
and is about 11 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is
how I revived my Raspberry Pi Model 1 B with Pie Core and a tiny SD card.
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Hey everyone, this is Claudio M.
This is Claudio M, recording an episode for Hacker Public Radio.
I wanted to share with you today a little project that I took up yesterday during my lunch break.
You'll have to excuse the noise, the background noise. I'm actually driving to work at the moment.
It's going to be sounds of my turning signal.
You're going to hear noises from outside, the car, the whole spiel.
Just bear with that.
Anyway, as I was saying, I was taking a little project during my lunch break.
I have one of my worksites. I actually have this old Dell is run laptop that I use.
It was running Slackware current with the 5.4.23 kernel.
As great as it was to use, it's obviously a slow machine.
It's a pinium M with I think it only has two gigabytes.
But anyway, it's very old, not so fast and slow, definitely.
But anyway, I use that every time to time, just as a H to SDF.
I used to use the graphical environment on it, running XFCE, and it ran okay.
But the machine has just gradually started to deteriorate as far as stability is concerned.
So, I've got to the point where I couldn't use X or anymore.
It was stuck with just the command line because the graphics would get all messed up.
It was all corrupted, garbled.
So, I would just use the command line. I would SSH to SDF.
I would SSH to my other machines to connect to my IRC sessions using a RISC.
And it worked fine.
But lately, it's been kernel panicking quite a bit.
And I've managed to figure out that it has something to do with the Broadcom driver.
Apparently, there's an issue with the kernel that causes the Broadcom module to cause a kernel panic.
It's on these older systems.
So, that obviously isn't going to work for me.
So, I was thinking about an alternative to something like that, something I could use.
That's command line driven, and that's very, that would run well on very minimal hardware.
So, then I remembered that I still have in my bag my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B.
And it's just sitting there doing nothing. I keep taking it to work every day.
And I get caught up with things during work day, things are in just life.
It gets in the way, so I completely forget about it.
But I thought about, well, what if I take this little machine and replace the laptop with it?
I can set it up just as a machine to SSH2, hook it up to a monitor.
It's a SSH2 SDF, but IRC just do all those things that I can do from a command line.
And get rid of this old Dell laptop. That's not, that's basically not working anymore.
So, I went ahead and I grabbed it to get out of my bag.
And then I remembered I had this remote SD card that wasn't being used for anything.
Now, mind you, I have other SD cards or 16GIG, but they already have things that I use on them on my other pies at home.
And I don't want to, I don't necessarily want to wipe the contents of those SD cards.
But I did have one SD card that I really didn't care too much about.
And then I kind of used to play around with.
It was, it's an old 128 megabyte, yes.
I said megabyte as the card.
Now, I did put, I did put risco s on it.
Very minimal installation risco s that was available that has basic.
And that was fun to play around with for a while, but I wanted something that I can actually use on this SD card.
So, the hunt began.
I started looking online to see if maybe NetBSD would be able to run on this.
And even though NetBSD will run on the pie, it won't fit on that SD card.
I think the smallest installer image is double the size of the SD card.
So, forget me here.
I'm just dealing with traffic at the moment.
I'm trying to focus on this.
Okay.
Back to my story.
So, NetBSD wasn't going to cut it for me until, unless I got a bigger SD card.
And right now, at that moment, I could not use the bigger SD card.
So it was the 128 megabyte one or bust.
So I said, let me look online and see what I find.
So I went online, looked for tiny OSs that would fit on the smallest SD card for the pie.
And I came across an OS that I actually tinkered around with a while ago, but didn't do much with.
Tiny Core Linux.
And Tiny Core Linux actually has a version specifically for the pie called PieCore.
And as I went to their website, I noticed that it's still being maintained.
And the packages are still actively maintained for it as well.
Now they call their packages extensions.
So I decided, okay, let me go download an image that I can put into this SD card.
The image is really small.
So small, I still have extra space on the 128 megabyte SD card.
So I took it, the image to there, booted up from the SD card, followed the instructions on the website,
and on the image provided to resize partition.
And I was good to go.
I actually had, I think, like, 60-something megabytes left over.
And that's just with the base install, which includes SSH and a couple of other tools.
It also has the TCE application that allows you to install, remove, basically manage, it's a package manager basically.
So that's a nice little feature, and you can do it from the command line.
I was able to install a GNU screen.
I was hoping Teamux was there, but it's not one of the packages included, so I had to settle for a GNU screen.
And I just had to play around with the status bar settings and making it just tweaking.
And so it gave me what Teamux would give me.
But aside from that, I was able to SSH to SDF, I was able to SSH to my BSD machines, which have my RISC configurations for RISC.
And it worked perfectly.
No complaints, very happy.
So yeah, all in 128 megabyte SD card, a usable system.
So I was able to accomplish my challenge, which was nice.
Now, I had hoped for a BSD, but this will work.
However, I wasn't informed by someone on Macedon that there is something called Nano BSD.
And it's basically a very minimal installation of FBSD.
However, the install process is a little different from what you would expect.
You don't download an image, and there's actually scripts that you have to run within FBSD to create the image and then pass that over.
So rather interesting, I may give it a try, because I really wouldn't like a BSD on it.
But for now, TinyCorp will do the job.
I was also turned on to Alpine Linux by someone on Macedon today this morning.
So I may give that a try as well, so we'll see.
I'm not going to complete the settle on this.
If I like Alpine, I'll stick with Alpine or Nano BSD.
But we'll see. It's a fun little project and something that allowed me to bring my old Raspberry Pi 1 Model B back to life and back into use.
So that's it. That's my episode. I hope you enjoyed it.
If not, just let me know in the comments. If you did, let me know in the comments.
I'll provide links in the show notes once I get to work. I'll make this all available for you.
And be sure to contribute to AgriPublic Radio just like I did right now.
I actually recorded this on my phone, like I said. You might be hearing background noise from the phone moving around.
And as Ken has always said, it's not the quality of the audio.
It's the quality of the content that's important.
So anything that's of interest to hackers and hackers in the true sense of the term with immediate tells you.
So just be sure to record someone will find an interest in whatever you have to say.
And submit it to AgriPublicRadio. If you go to AgriPublicRadio.org, you'll find the instructions on how to record and how to upload an episode.
Anyway, this is Claudio M. Hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll be sure to record it a few more, maybe on this or actually have something in mind for a future episode regarding something I did with my old EPC 901 a couple months ago, a few months ago.
Anyway, have a good one. Bye-bye.
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