which os should be theBOX running?
well since the brains of the system is raspberry pi5 the obvious choice would be Raspberry pi OS or Raspbian as it was called but theBOX uses a touch screen for all its navigation and Raspberry pi os was built up from the ground to be navigated with a keyboard and mouse which theBOX lacked while not docked (yep am planning to build a dock for it as well)
The issue with raspberry pi os (Raspbian)
- Raspberry pi os uses PIXEL desktop environment by default which is light weight but no suitable for touch navigation
So I set out to find the best operating system to run on theBOX
Raspberry pi has great software support for example for choice of operating system by default you can run Ubuntu, Kali, Parrot ,Alpin linux , Arch linux and many more without tinkering too much
Attempt:1 Kali Linux
My first thought was to just go with Kali since its the go to operating system for everyone who is interested in hacking or pen testing
after Installing Kali on the pi 5 I was met with the first roadblock
the kali install was not displaying an display out the touch display 2
since the touch display drivers are baked into the pi os i was not able to get it to give me display out to the touch display 2
Attempt:2 Ubuntu
Since kali was a no go i installed ubuntu the sd card and booted into it unlike most OS installed through the Raspberry pi Imager Ubuntu cannot be preconfigured so we have to boot the sd card and install the OS manually like a normal install
Ubuntu uses Gnome as its desktop environment which had great touch compatibility compared all the operating system excluding something like android which was build up to be a touch based OS
problems with Ubuntu on theBOX
- Raspberry pi touch display 2's native orientation is portrait which mean for the os install it booted into portrait and the scaling was all over the place
- Ubuntu doesn't allow to switch on the accessibility menu in the live environment which means we cannot use the one screen keyboard for the initial install
- after installing Ubuntu with a keyboard and mouse and switching the orientation to landscape the touch experience on Ubuntu was great
- after rebooting ubuntu stop detecting the touch inputs outside from the login screen (probably a driver issue)
- these issues persisted even after installing ubuntu multiple times
Attempt:3 Parrot OS
Just like kali linux, Parrot os is also popular amoung hackers and pen testers and Parrot Os does offer a version of Parrot os for raspberry pi which can be downloaded from the Parrot os Website
Didn't face any hickups during the flashing/installation of Parrot Os to the SD card using rpi-imager
problems with Parrot os
- Well Parrot os required password to login and it was on the shell (no GUI) which means again required a keyboard to navigate which theBOX did not have
Attempt:4 Fedora
well tried both KDE and GNOME of fedora but again the same issue as Ubuntu after rebooting
Attempt:5 Android
Finally ended up trying to install Android on the pi 5 , i ended up going with KonstaKANG's Build of Android 14,15 of lineage OS ended up running into the same issue as the other os , No Display out to the touch display 2 but everything seems to be working fine when a monitor is connected to through HDMI
Conclusion
Also tried Arch Linux , Manjaro and Fyde OS but the results were similar non them was compatible with the touch display 2
Well due to not having any drivers for the touch display 2 i ended up decided to use raspberry pi os but with some modifications ofcourse
first of all we'll have to change the desktop environment to gnome since it had the best touch navigation from mostly everything we tested
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