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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] While it has been possible to get Alpine on the Pi for some time – Raspberry Pi 2 owners have been able to get it working since version 3.2.0 – this is the first version to add support for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and also offer an arm64 (aarch64) image to ease deployment.
The Pi 3 Model B+ packs a surprising amount of power into a small package, rocking a 64 bit 1.4GHz processor and gigabit ethernet (over USB 2.0). The 1GB RAM (unchanged from the previous Model B) should give the slimline Alpine incarnation of Linux more than enough headroom, depending what else you decide to run.
[...] Alpine's frugal nature makes it appealing as an alternative to some of the more resource intensive distributions available for the Pi, with optimisations such as OpenRC replacing systemd as the init system. A minimal disk installation will only consume around 130MB and the maintainers claim a container only needs 8MB.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KritonK on Wednesday July 04 2018, @07:18AM (2 children)
(The usual question is "will it run Linux", but in this case the answer is obviously yes.)
My question is, which distribution is best for multimedia. Raspbian is sort of OK, but not great: there's omxplayer for it, which works great as a player, if you don't mind a command line based utility, but it all goes downhill from there. Unless you build them yourself, using unofficial patches, standard players such as vlc and mpv do not use hardware acceleration, and are abysmally slow. Custom built versions display video either as fixed overlays or full screen; you can't have hardware accelerated video in a window. (This may be a limitation of the hardware, but I'm not sure.) Even with this limitation, mpv, e.g., is somewhat slower than omxplayer, so it doesn't take full advantage of the hardware. Finally, front ends, such as smplayer, are hopelessly old, and you need to build newer versions of those, as well.
I'm thinking of switching to some other distribution, but I don't know which. I looked into Fedora, with which I'm familiar, but they don't support audio on the RPi, yet, so it isn't a good distribution for a machine that I want to use mainly as a media player.
So, is there a Linux distribution for the RPi, which has full hardware support for the RPI, has recent versions of the various software packages, instead of Debian stable's antique versions, supports hardware acceleration out of the box in its builds of the various media players, and has a build of omxplayer available for it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @08:57AM (1 child)
The real question is.. Will it run FreeBSD [freebsd.org] or any other BSD..?
Avoids poettering'd and provides a integrated kernel + userland, conservative code changes etc.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:07PM
Of course it does [raspbsd.org]. However, the situation appears to be even worse regarding multimedia, or even a graphical environment. (Or, these guys simply don't know how to promote their own product. What does "The Graphical Images currently only have a VideoCore kernel modules added to them. In the future a GUI and other tools will be preloaded" mean? Is GUI support something that has not been implemented yet, or is adding a GUI simply a matter of installing the relevant packages after the installation of the base system?)
Even with FreeBSD, my question remains: does it fulfill my requirements for a multimedia machine?