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There are 3 models of the Raspberry Pi 4 (RPI4) available. They are identical except for the amount of RAM onboard; choose from 1GB of RAM, 2 GB of RAM, or 4GB of RAM. There’s no way of upgrading the RAM once a user has made their purchase. So it’s pretty important to choose the model that best fits your requirements, or you may end up spending more than necessary, or even need to buy extra RPI4’s. For this week’s blog, I’m seeking to provide information that’ll help you determine which model of the RPI4 to get.

I’ve reviewed a smorgasbord of open source music players. But there’s still quite a few I’ve yet to put through their paces. For this review, I’m looking at Deepin Music. The software bills itself as a “beautiful and simple music player that plays local audio. It supports viewing lyrics during playback, playing lossless audio, and playlist customization”.

Given the multimedia strengths of the RPI4, I’ve spent a few weeks covering video streaming, then examining the viability of the RPI4 to play locally stored video, before turning to examining the RPI4 as a home theater. Continuing this theme, for this week’s blog I look at the RPI4 as a screencaster.

This week, I’ve been exploring LXMusic. It’s a minimalist music player for LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment. LXMusic is written in the C programming language, and uses GTK+, a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. LXMusic is based on xmms2, using xmms2d, a daemon through which XMMS2 clients playback and manage music.

I’ve covered some fairly meaty areas in this blog in recent weeks. For this week, I’m turning to a much lighter side of the Linux desktop. Reading comics on the RPI4.

elementary OS is a distribution based on Ubuntu that focuses mainly on non-technical users. That pretty much describes me. I’ve been meaning to try elementary OS for a while. Before doing so, I’m going to explore some apps designed for it, starting with Melody. Melody is a music player designed for elementary OS but runs on other Linux distributions. Luke puts Melody under the microscope.

This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers. In this week's blog, we put Kodi through its paces on the RPI4. Kodi is free, open-source software for managing your local collection of movies, television shows, music, and photos. It’s the finest free home theater software available, although it’s interface isn’t the most intuitive. It can even play games.

conrad is a free and open source command-line tool designed to help you track conferences and meetups. The tool is written in Python.

For this week's blog, I’m looking at straightforward video playback from locally stored media. Does the RPI4 have sufficient grunt to be a capable video player?

exa is a modern replacement for ls, a venerable command-line program that’s an integral part of any Linux distribution.

It’s common knowledge that Christmas is a time for merriment, goodwill to everyone, and above all a time for lists. So there’s no better time to compile a list for the year. Once you’ve digested everything below, you can plan your new year resolutions!

For this week’s blog, I’m putting the Raspberry Pi 4 through its paces as a viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. I look at the pre-installed solutions including qpdfview, comparing them to the many other PDF viewers in the Raspbian repositories.

nyancat is an animated, color, ANSI-text program that renders a loop of the classic Nyan Cat animation.

Golly is a free and open source cross-platform application for exploring Conway’s Game of Life and many other types of cellular automata.

I’ve received a few requests to see how the RPI4 fares as a remote desktop client. I can see this could make sense. The RPI4 offers dual monitor support. It should have sufficient CPU and GPU resources to act as a functional remote desktop, particularly when connecting to servers that have better system resources.

gorss is a simple free and open source RSS/Atom reader. It’s written in the Golang language. The program offers support for highlighting specific words.

This week’s Raspberry Pi 4 blog focuses on excellent free and open source e-book software that runs on this single-board computer.

I’ve been writing reviews of Linux music players discovering a raft of gems along the way, together with a fair few turkeys. That’s the nature of open source software. It’s not necessarily an indication of quality or maturity. But with a mesmerizing selection on offer, there’s almost always free software that meets my specific requirements. For this review, I’m looking at Gemini, an audio player that sports an integrated wallpaper changer.

The last couple of weeks I’ve looked at whether the RPI4 is capable of two absolutely essential desktop activities: web browsing and email. I was impressed by the wee device in this regard. This week I’m summarizing my experiences of another fundamental desktop activity: running an office suite.

There are two main grepping utility-families: grep and ack. The former is for the plain searching and is ubiquitous. The latter offers smart searching, meaning it knows what files should be filtered out. ripgrep is a hybrid solution that recursively searches your current directory for a regex pattern.