This is a multi-part blog looking at a Raspberry Pi 5 running Linux as a desktop computer.
I previously looked at raspi-config, a useful tool that comes installed with Raspberry Pi OS. But it’s not the only configuration tool available for this single board computer.
PiGro is a free and open source system configuration tool that’s best installed using Pi-Apps. I’ll be exploring Pi-Apps in the next article in this series. PiGro is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
The purpose of the tool is to streamline the process of managing all your Raspberry Pi settings from one convenient location. Besides the Raspberry Pi OS, it also supports Ubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Rhino Linux and MX Linux.
Here’s the opening pane. It’s a dashboard giving live updates of CPU usage, CPU temperature, RAM usage, hard disk usage, together with more information about the key components of the system.
A few notes about my configuration. While Raspberry Pi OS uses Wayland by default, I switched over to X11 as some of my preferred software tools have issues with Wayland.
I’m running two monitors. The tool says the resolution is 4992×1920. My setup has the Pi 5 connected to 2 monitors, one with 1920×1080 resolution, the other 3072×1920. You might also notice the Cpu Freq Max is 2600 Mhz, as I’m slightly overclocking this machine. The 16GB Pi 5 is combined with a 1TB NVMe.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Dashboard
Page 2 – Update
Page 3 – Source List
Page 4 – System
Page 5 – Look & Feel
Page 6 – Autostart
Page 7 – Tasks
Page 8 – Software
Page 9 – Tuning
Page 10 – Backup
All articles in this series:
| Raspberry Pi 5 Series | |
|---|---|
Hardware | |
| iRasptek Starter Kit | All the kit you need to get started with the Pi 5 |
| Pironman 5 Case Review | Transform the Pi 5 into a beautiful desktop mini PC |
| Passive Cooling the Pi 5 | Passively cool your Pi 5 the right way. Silent yet cool |
| Benchmarking | Benchmarking the Pi 5 against an Intel N100 mini PC |
| Overclocking | Let's increase the clock speed of the BCM2712 SoC |
| Power Consumption | Compare the power consumption of the Pi 5 with Intel Mini PCs |
Configuration | |
| raspi-config | Useful text-based tool to configure the Pi 5 |
| PiGro | GUI tool that streamlines the process of managing the Pi 5 |
| Increase Swap Memory Size | Increase the swap size from 512MB to 2GB |
| ZRAM swapdrive | Simple script to use a ZRAM swapdrive instead of a swapfile |