The Bakery

I would like to raise the bar for late answers to enter the Late Answers Review Queue to 50 rep, which is the threshold after which users gain the ability to comment. Here are some answers that were posted by users with between 10 to 50 rep (yes, there's a little selection bias to be sure. I susp...

I was confused by this at first because it says raising the bar would cause a jump in the "late answers" queue.

Roland

sure thing!

Steve Robillard

I saw that after the jump but it wasn't clear that was the cause

I was afraid it was a robotic spammer but could see no evidence of that - especially since we had a nepalese trekking outfit spamming liberally while you were hiking ironically

goldilocks

@SteveRobillard I'm sure it is. I didn't realize that "the bar" there is that that queue only contains stuff from "new users", formerly defined as < 10 rep. So when it got set to 50 the other day, the queues grew. If you look in the comments, Physics.SE ended up with like 3k+, lol.

Steve Robillard

I will make a dent in it over the weekend

goldilocks

7:09 PM

I'm sure that could have been avoided in a way that cost fewer people hours.

Steve Robillard

or with some prior warning at least

goldilocks

@Roland Anyway, like I said, I think you may have some decent questions plural in there, but inviting people to a "Windows or Linux?" party is like, dangerous.

I'm sure people have been killed over this before somewhere.

Steve Robillard

@goldilocks especially in this case where it is a bit of an apples and oranges proposition

Roland

yes, I see. I was hoping that my 6 points whould make my question specific enough to give it a definite answer

goldilocks

Like the C vs. C++ thing, or python vs. perl, or foo vs. bar, there are always people determined to prove that their conclusion is completely objective. Unfortunately, the lifetime of the universe is probably not enough to prove it widely enough.

Roland

7:12 PM

and the definite answer is: Nope, Windows IoT can't do that.

Steve Robillard

@goldilocks I was gonna say emacs vs vim lol

Roland

It's not a question of paradigms. It's a question of what windows IoT can do right now. and this is more a question of notepad++ vs. emacs

goldilocks

@SteveRobillard Another great one.

Steve Robillard

@Roland lol

Roland

I wasn't aware (until I did some research) how bare Windows IoT Core is.

goldilocks

7:13 PM

@Roland Sure, so saying "No you can't use Windows IoT for _____" is fine.

But that requires a very specific question.

Roland

remote desktop? Nope.

DLNA? Nope.

Media Players? If you enjoy console-operated ones - maybe.

As I might have said in the question: I was hoping that my six points (and fulfilling all at the same time) would make the question in total specific enough

but I admit that the title was not specific enough.

And with some time, Windows IoT might evolve into something capable of doing this.

goldilocks

@Roland Sounds like basically just the kernel and fundamental userspace interfaces. That makes sense, since the whole shebang would not be very suited to embedded work. The issue then is because it's new, all the third party things than target normal windows won't work. And that stuff is probably mostly proprietary, so unless the original source want to compile it for IoT ARMv7, you're stuck.

Roland

(that is, the zoo of raspberry apps

goldilocks

Of course, that's also an opportunity if you're a developer out to carve a niche.

Roland

To put it in a nicer way: Windows IoT currently is sandbox. With some forms and lots of sand.

But not a lot of anything else.

goldilocks

7:18 PM

Like, you don't have to be one of umpteen DNLA server implementations. You could be the first one.

Roland

But then: I dont want to reinvent the wheel.

goldilocks

@Roland It wouldn't really be re-inventing it, it's be implementing wheels for a vehicle that doesn't have any available yet. WRT DNLA, there's lower level stuff like decoders and such that would be necessary first I guess. A lot of work.

Of course it'

s a drag if you just want to get going with things.

Roland

As I understand it, you can use visual studio to develop apps for your Windows IoT device.

and visual studio supports C# as well as python

I wouldnt be surprised if these languages dont have great packages for your different interesting applications

goldilocks

@Roland Presumably. I admit to not being any kind of windows user. I don't hate MS particularly, I just don't have a use for it, or time.

Roland

The main thing I learned by having to research my answer myself is the following:

If you are a 'normal' windows user

and you expect Windows IoT to behave like Win7, Win8 or 10.

You are very, very wrong.

goldilocks

7:25 PM

Rip out your hair?

Roland

They do share a name

and maybe even a kernel

but there's one thing windows IoT doesn't have for sure:

windows.

goldilocks

I think that's predicable -- although your normal windows user might not get why.

Roland

If you know linux (maybe ubuntu, maybe debian) and you have a look what will run on the RPi, you'll notice raspian

goldilocks

There must be a tish load of ARMv7 windows mobile devices around, I wonder why they just don't port that.

Roland

sure, the UI is what you are used with gnome, kde (or whatever)

but the basic things you are used with your desktop are there (how you apt-get etc)

Steve Robillard

7:28 PM

@Roland that is the source of most of the problems/confusion regarding win10 on the pi it sets an expextation that is fundamentally an impedence mismatch with the reality

goldilocks

@Roland Yeah, although I think the performance with the heftier DE's is going to be disappointing. I mostly use it headless.

Roland

I would have expected that Windows IoT is to Win10 as raspian is to debian

*UI is not what you are used

Steve Robillard

@Roland I think most did (including me when first announced)

Roland

This was my fallacy as well

Steve Robillard

when evaluated as an IOT device it is clearly designed to solve a different problem than the raspbian/ubuntu on Pi setups

goldilocks

7:30 PM

@Roland The "why" there is a completely independent party can take Debian and do their own thing with it because of how the licensing is -- that's Raspbian. There's no formal relationship there AFAIK. In fact, on the web site it looks like it is mostly one guy, who doesn't even work for the foundation. I hope they have thrown him some cash.

But even if you could get your hands on the goodies to adapt windows X mobile for the pi, they would send a platoon of lawyers over pretty quick.

It's probably not worthwhile for them to do it officially, either. If they want to release or back a little device like that, they'd do it separately from the pi, I think. Not a dev board, something more like the Cubie or Apple TV.

Paying $35 for the computer and then $100 for the OS would seem a little odd...

Roland

indeed

I hope that it's OK that I answered my own question in the comments after it was closed.

I'm currently reading raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/15192/…

I need to format the sd card to ext4 before writing anything on it, correct?

goldilocks

@Roland No that's fine. I think it's good we "close" questions and don't simply delete them, since it there can be a purpose and information in there, just it's gotten too far out of structural bounds. If you're not aware, it is possible and even encouraged to write "self-answered questions" to share your knowledge. There's actually a button for this at the bottom of the "Ask Question" page, so you can compose and post it all at once. I think there's a rep requirement for that tho.

But if you don't meet it, you can post your own answer anyway after 24 h or something.

Roland

Yes, I've answered questions of mine before, which I why I posted these comments (in lieu of being able to answer)

goldilocks

7:46 PM

@Roland You need to have a partition on the card that's ext4 if you want to copy individual files into it, including a whole OS distribution worth of files. If you're starting with a partition image, you can just copy that in without formatting, but you need to make sure it's the same size -- that's kind of an unusual route.

There's two aspects of "formatting" WRT to a block device such as an SD card:

- Partitions have to be labelled with the type of filesystem they've been formatted as, but that labelling is not actually formatting. It's an indication in the MBR used by an OS kernel so it knows what to look for. And I guess the hardware BIOS or equivalent.

- Then the partition itself has to be formatted correctly.

So, pi images are actually device images that contain multiple partitions, and an MBR that contains the layout.

In case that's a new concept:

Master boot record

A master boot record (MBR) is a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond. The concept of MBRs was publicly introduced in 1983 with PC DOS 2.0. The MBR holds the information on how the logical partitions, containing file systems, are organized on that medium. Besides that, the MBR also contains executable code to function as a loader for the installed operating system—usually by passing control over to the loader's second stage, or in conjunction with...

Roland

just to make sure we dont talk about two different things

I'm trying to use NOOBS to install raspian

if my sd card partition is a FAT32 partition

and I copy (!) the NOOBS files from the NOOBS zip onto it

will the RPi be able to read it?

i'm not using any kind of image right now

goldilocks

Based on this github.com/raspberrypi/noobs#setup that sounds right.

It seems to me that NOOBs then does it's own formatting after you load it the first time, and creates and resizes different partitions.

So you don't have to understand how block devices are laid out, lol.

I hadn't looked that closely at it before.

A pretty clever friendly thing I guess.

Roland

8:07 PM

that's cool indeed

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