Category: Ubuntu

building neovim 0.10.0 on raspberry pi 5 ubuntu 24.04

whbeebe
neovim 0.10.0 running on a Raspberry Pi 5 under Ubuntu 24.04 inside the neovim 0.10.0 sources

I’m always vacillating between editors. A lot of times I get lazy and live inside Visual Studio Code. A lot of time I will fire up vim because I just want to do some code editing without the excess baggage, and if I need to do another task while writing in Rust for example I’ll open another console to perform that task, such as executing cargo build or cargo run. Sometimes I’ll even fire up an up-to-date version of Emacs, up-to-date as defined by me pulling the latest sources and building it myself.

For about a year now I’ve been using neovim ( https://github.com/neovim/neovim ) since it hit version 0.8.0. Furthermore I have my neovim configured with AstroNvim ( https://astronvim.com/ ) with no changes. Works fine for what I want and need. I have neovim installed everywhere, from Linux Mint to all my MacBook Pros, and even to my lowly Raspberry Pi 5. The big difference between the Pi and every other system is that there is no prebuilt binary for aarch64 on the Raspberry Pi. So I pulled down the sources and successfully built it.

The directions for building neovim are clear enough that even a retired old trained monkey such as myself can successfully build and deploy a working copy. If you can read and follow directions then you’re golden. I knew this wasn’t going to be a problem because I build neovim 0.9.5 for Ubuntu 23.10 when it was running on my Pi. And before you ask, yes, you can have apt install neovim 0.9.5 and be done with it. But 0.10.0 has been out for a while now, and as I always want the latest stable release, and Ubuntu is notorious for only installing whatever versions it had when it was officially released, I just built it.

Building neovim took all of about five minutes. In the grand scheme of things that’s nothing. And because I built it I now have another up-to-date tool in my toolbox that makes code development, dare I say it, fun.

switching away from that ubuntu update due to instability

whbeebe
Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop Raspberry Pi 5

As of today, a little less than 48 hours from when I switched back to 23.10 and updated, I’m back on my “pure” Ubuntu 24.04 desktop on my Raspberry Pi 5.

I don’t know why, but the updated installation proved to be unstable, with the system randomly rebooting after the update. I suspect that it was the extension manager coupled with the desktop clock that you will note is not running in the lower left corner. I had written earlier how very unstable the extension manager was after the initial 24.04 installation and how I had removed it completely. Apparently even grandfathering it in via the 23.10 -> 24.04 update proved to be as unstable as a clean install. Live and learn.

And since I’m living and learning I don’t think I’ll update to 24.10 in spite of what I wrote in the last post. I cherish stability above all else in my operating systems, both personal and professionally.

You might ask why I didn’t remove the desktop clock and the extension manager. Because I already had a clean stable install of 24.04 ready to go with very little effort to swap in. And just because I suspected it was those two applications, I couldn’t prove that was the issue. I didn’t want to run the risk that it was something else. So I just simply made the swap.