Ubuntu support for Banana Pi?

[Robert Heller]

There are three fairly major "commonallities";

1) 40 Pin GPIO header, generally compatible with the Raspberry Pi, so many Pi 
HATs and Bonnets will work with these machines.

2) "Credit Card" SBC form factor (more or less).

3) Linuix ARM O/S 

Yes, otherwise they are completely different systems, but given the above they 
all can fit into a common "niche".

I too have a "farm" (LAN) of Raspberry Pis, but also a Banana Pi M64 and a
Beagle Bone Black are on my network,

But those three things make them about as alike as pair of "PCs".  Yes, a Dell 
and a HP are completely different machines, but most people would clump them 
together under the class of "PCs" (as opposed to Macs or Game Consoles, etc.).

> 
> Liam, thank you for clarifying this.  I run several Raspberry Pi 4 units 
> in my house.  Marvelous little devices.
> 
> On 2/28/25 06:14, Liam Proven wrote:
> > On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 at 17:54, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Yes, there are various flavors of Pis: Raspberry, Banana, Orange, and Rock...
> > I think this is so very inaccurate that it is _wildly_ misleading.
> >
> > It is akin to saying that there are many flavours of Ford cars: VW,
> > Seat, Daewoo.
> >
> > No there are not.
> >
> > There is a very successful range of Arm-based single-board computers
> > from the UK called Raspberry
> > Pi, so named because the original plan was to make a cheap computer
> > for kids that could run Python.
> >
> > Pi is a mathematical constant and a Greek letter and so it can't be
> > copyrighted or trademarked.
> >
> > As a result lots of other companies have launched _totally unrelated_
> > Arm-based SBCs called "something Pi", many of them $FRUIT Pi. They are
> > not flavours of Raspberry Pi. They are nothing to do with the
> > Raspberry Pi in *any way*.
> >
> > They are, in effect, rival competitors who have copied part of the name.
> >
> > Some but not all have compatible form factors or ports but they are
> > not related and not software compatible.
> >
> > A notable difference is that Raspberry Pi Ltd supports its devices for
> > years and newer Linux kernels are available.
> >
> > The semi-cloners do not. You often get 1 release ever.  Maybe if
> > you're lucky you'll get a few updates for a year. Then the device is
> > dropped because there is a newer model to replace it.
> >
> > This is why projects like Armbian exist: to offer continuation of
> > Linux support for old discontinued SBCs.
> >
> > But to compare the cloners with RPL is grossly unfair.
> >
> > Another big difference is that the cloners only offer Linux. Real RPL
> > RasPi computer support multiple OSes and because they've sold millions
> > that support is wide.
> >
> > As well as Linux the real RasPi can run RISC OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
> > OpenBSD, Plan 9, Windows
> > IOT, and others.
> >
> > Do not muddle up the real RasPi with the legions of inferior knock-offs.
> >

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