I want Advice on DevTerm Setup & Best Use Cases

[kieranas]

Hey everyone,

I got my hands on a ClockworkPi DevTerm & I am super excited to dive into it. I am still figuring out the best ways to set it up and use it efficiently. I want to hear from experienced users about their setup and any must-have tweaks.

1. Should I stick with the stock OS or try something else?
2. Any tips for making it run smoother and more efficiently?
3. What is the most interesting thing you have done with your DevTerm?
4. Any hacks to extend battery life?

I am planning to use it for light programming, retro gaming & some tinkering with Linux. Also; I am considering using it for java training do you think it is a good fit for that?

If you have any insights or just want to share your DevTerm experience, I want to hear them.
Also i have check this What Database do you use on your DevTerm and what is your use case? witch is good.

Thank you…

[white-round-square]

@kieranas

Should I stick with the stock OS or try something else?

Bookworm 6.12.y for the uConsole and DevTerm

UPDATE: 6.12.19 Image Added support for the CM3! The CM3 is now supported on the DevTerm and uConsole with this image. I’m sure not many people will need this but here it is! The Mesa driver problem was also fixed in this image and via update. If you downgraded and held the mesa packages you can unhold them and upgrade now. If you have a CM5 lite and are having problems with the sd card booting. Try this solution by @paragonnov Your CM5 lite has to have updated firmware that was released after…

[adcockm]

Definitely go with a community OS build of your choice. More information on why at the links below…

An Official CM5 Image?

I seriously doubt clockwork is going to put out an os to support the CM5. If you want the best there is to offer from the community, look to the images put out by @Rex. There has been a lot of improvement lately. The community osses are maintained and enhanced often. To my knowledge clockwork hasn’t done anything to the clockwork pi os in over a year.

Is GameShell OS still maintained?

Really appreciate all the replies, @adcockm! I guess I was hoping there would have been some solution to this by now, but I think I might just have a bad board. Also, weirdly, the battery is now acting up as well and not charging properly (might need replacing since it’s almost 5y old at this point ). Seeing all the responses and some other threads, the official OS seems pretty much dead at this point. I guess I’ll have to dedicate one of these upcoming weekends to see if the co…

Questions 2, 3, and 4 have relevant answers scattered around the forums from posts over the past few years. I’d recommend searching a bit. Battery life and performance have definitely been discussed a lot, from the best sorts of batteries to use, to scripts and configuration settings to adjust for better performance or battery life. It’s also worth noting that for the Rex builds especially, some of the Devterm information may be in the uConsole section of the forum since the OS builds for both the uConsole and the Devterm are the same in that particular build (but with minor settings adjustments to activate one or the other, or CM4 vs CM5).

Question 3 is rather vague, but lots of posts have been made over the years with either software people have successfully used on the Devterm, or hardware mods, or 3D printed case mods, etc. Some modifcations have been quite elaborate, like the cartridge based hardware system someone made to support the printer and other add-ons like ethernet/serial ports and other stuff.

Regarding java, anything that can be run on a Raspberry Pi 4 (assuming you have the CM4 version and not the A06 version) should work. I haven’t used java recently, but I’m pretty sure using the Oracle version requires a lot of extra setup since it’s not in the usual debian repositories. The version that is the default and is in the repositories may not be 100% compatible with the Oracle version, so that could be an issue depending on what you need to use. Maybe that’s not as much of an issue now, as my experience with it in a Pi was from maybe 5+ years ago.

While these are focused on uConsole, the suggestions mostly apply to the Devterm as well:

Just received my uConsole, now what? A list of links of interest

I’ll receive mine in a few days so feel free to add your “first steps” or “things you should do right after starting your uConsole” I’ve seen people saying “I installed this distro” or “I compiled this software” or “I modified this config” or even “I added this attachment to the case” So even if I ask for things I should consider for my uConsole, I ask the seasoned users to think of this topic as a general “sort of troubleshoot” or “sort of list of improvements” that every new user should ha…

GitHub - cjstoddard/Clockworkpi-uConsole: 10 things to do after you get your ClockworkPi...

Definitely worth diving into those links and considering some of those things!

[Greg_E]

For the time being, do not use a CM3+ module in it. a04 and a06 have been abandoned, so not a real solution. If it were me, I’d go with cm4 lite wifi with at least 4GB of RAM, 8GB is also good.

If you already have one of the other processors (cm3, a04, a06) you are pretty much limited to the clockwork images, if a06 you can also go with an older Armbian, but it needs to be kernel 5.10 and the newer 5.17 or higher does not work.