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Raspberry Pi Reviewed, With an Initial Setup Guide
jjslash writes "It has been six years in the making, with the original goal of the project intending to reignite computer programming in schools across the country. Despite those honorable intentions, the $35 ARM-based credit-card sized computer has captured the imagination of programmers, consumers and tinkerers alike, resulting in unprecedented demand for the product. Last month the first 10,000 credit-card sized computers were set to make their way to those who pre-ordered them back in February. TechSpot takes a look at the Pi Model B, covering the basic steps for setting up the computer, as well as basic post-installation tasks those first using it might encounter."
Now you can buy an entire computer for less than a license for the Windows operating system.
Screw the children. The raspberry sounds like a near perfect platform for a freedom box. Imagine your own personal "facebook" server that knows how to find the personal servers of all your friends without actually relying on the "man in the middle attack" that is facebook itself.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Just out of curiosity, what functional (as opposed to ideological) alternatives to the Raspberry Pi are there in this price bracket?
None, I think. Only less functional (say, 8-bit microcontroller kit / Arduino stuff?), more expensive ones (like Beagleboard), or used / bulky / second hand gear.
Personally I like the Raspberry Pi a lot for its combination of cheap, small, brand new, and open-friendly. Biggest minus IMHO is that it's not 100% open due to lacking chipset documentation/drivers. Which limits what OS'es you can run or develop on it. Had such documentation been complete, this would be a perfect dev board for alternative OS experiments.
Well mine arrived yesterday. First impressions:
Build quality is a bit iffy - the SD / HDMI and power connectors won't last 5 minutes with frequent swapping and some of the solder joints look to have been "reworked".
Connected keyboard/mouse and HDMI monitor put the Fedora image on an SD card and powered her up.... Kernel panic :( Futzed around for a while and finally found that it didn't like the keyboard I was using (generic cheepie).
Connected the network and removed the keyboard and mouse. Eventually booted to a login prompt on the display. SSH in and all looked good.
Decided to try Debian. That had the same problem with the keyboard as Fedora. Found another keyboard (ancient Fujitsu Siemens one) that it didn't object to and got into the GUI. Biggest problem here was the resolution was some strange one (1896x788 or something) which looked awful on a 1920x1080 screen, but at least I was able to fire up the browser and "surf the web".
Back to Fedora... Tried to get into the GUI again with the working keyboard but startx crashed the first time and just came up with a blank screen the second.
Reflashed the image and had an awful row with the password settings. By luck I'd set a local timeserver when I'd first logged in by SSH (no, I don't give extarnal access to every device on the network so the default timeservers weren't accessible). This meant the passwords were set with a valid date. Second time around the "firstboot" script ran, setting up users but without the time being set, so the passwords were flagged as expired and had to be changed on every login - very annoying.
Finally got into the Fedora GUI but it was slooooooow.
Overall, yes it works. Some effort is needed on the default images if it's to be used by the great unwashed. Need to play with the GPIO as that's where my interest is...