Hardware Raspberry Pi review

[schmidtbag]

Originally Posted by Gareth Halfacree

"Aside from the drivers?" That's a pretty big aside...

It is, but I wouldn't say its fair to call the OS in general immature strictly because of drivers. And as I've said before, debian squeeze is extremely out of date, there have been immense performance improvements to ARM that squeeze doesn't offer. Note that in the linux world, 6 months is like 3 people-years.

but if a sub-set of Debian developers are releasing a remix designed for the Raspberry Pi (which they are, and have) then it would be nice if it had things like hardware accelerated graphics and working audio, n'est-ce pas?

Fair enough, although I don't remember you specifying that you used one of these remixes. Keep in mind that many changes that occur in derivatives of distros don't always make it back to the parent distro, so it is completely possible that the Pi remix is notably faster than the default. Again, remix or not, squeeze is not going to give you desirable results. You just said "latest release" which could mean latest stable, unstable, or testing. I'm not trying to be an ass or anything, I'm trying to be informative. You'd be surprised how big of a difference there is between each repo of debian.

I actually completely forgot that you mentioned Quake III, my bad.

[Gareth Halfacree]

Originally Posted by schmidtbag

It is, but I wouldn't say its fair to call the OS in general immature strictly because of drivers. And as I've said before, debian squeeze is extremely out of date, there have been immense performance improvements to ARM that squeeze doesn't offer. Note that in the linux world, 6 months is like 3 people-years.

It's impossible to get a vanilla build of Debian (or any other operating system) to boot on the Raspberry Pi. You need to either do some serious hacking, or use one of the spins available from the Raspberry Pi download page, where someone has done the hacking for you.

Re-reading the review, I wasn't clear enough in what I was saying: where I'm talking about the 'default Debian distribution,' I don't mean vanilla Debian - I mean the default distribution provided on the Foundation's download page, specifically for use on the Raspberry Pi.

I'll go and amend that bit, save other people's confusion - ta!

Originally Posted by schmidtbag

You'd be surprised how big of a difference there is between each repo of debian.

Given that I do distro reviews for Linux User & Developer Magazine, I don't think I would be surprised.

[MiNiMaL_FuSS]

I'm interested in one as bit-torrent box, would I be able to use a USB hard drive alongside one, or is that asking too much?

[IanW]

Originally Posted by Gareth Halfacree

I didn't mention it in the review, but I did try to run Frontier: First Encounters in dosbox on it. The result was... Uninspiring. I don't have an official reading, but I eyeballed it at about 0.3 frames per second...

That's without hardware-accelerated video, of course. Once I've got that running, things might be very different.

Elite in a BBC emulator, on the other hand, should run fine. I might give that a go this evening, actually...

Not sure it has enough power to support an emulator & game.
That said, try Oolite - a freeware Mac Os / Windows / Linux port of Elite. You'd need to compile it from source though.

[Gareth Halfacree]

Originally Posted by MiNiMaL_FuSS

I'm interested in one as bit-torrent box, would I be able to use a USB hard drive alongside one, or is that asking too much?

That'd work fine. There's actually a trick to getting host bus powered devices working: plug a powered USB hub into the mains, connect it to the RasPi's USB port, wire in your bus-powered device and then connect a lead from the hub to the Pi's microUSB power socket. The result: everything draws its power from the hub, and you only need one mains socket for the whole lot.

[Angel OD]

Must... Water Cool... It...

[r3loaded]

It might also be worth trying Arch Linux as that is typically on the bleeding edge - kernel 3.3 is already in the official repo. You could also squeeze a lot of performance out by compiling packages yourself (possibly using DistCC to do the heavy lifting on the main computer) and setting mtune parameters for the RPi. Ditto for the GPU driver.

[ADJB]

Not sure it has enough power to support an emulator & game.
That said, try Oolite - a freeware Mac Os / Windows / Linux port of Elite. You'd need to compile it from source though.

A port of the FUSE Spectrum emulator is already up and running so given that there isn't a massive difference between a Speccy and a Beeb (or any of the other classic 8 bits) in terms of memory, overall power or game complexity then once the relevant emulators are ported I would be very surprised of the power of the Pi was an issue.

[Madness_3d]

Kinda glad I didn't get one now, will wait for a Raspberry Pi 2 and hope the whole platform is a bit more mature

[lp rob1]

Shame about the lack of Gigabit Ethernet. Would make the perfect file server if it had. Hopefully the Pi Foundation (read: Pie Base) will notice our comments and reflect with the Raspberry Pi 2.

[blackadda15]

Just got mine through the door let the experiments begin.

[Neogumbercules]

All I need to know is if there's a SNES emulator out there that will run on this thing.

[RichCreedy]

can i play angry birds on it?

[tonyd223]

OK, I'm old enough that I remember having a ZX81, I see the point of learning to program, but I'm just not sure of the relevance of this... I'll watch this space with interest, and it's so cheap I'd probably buy one anyway, but what would I use it for? I look forward to a dedicated projects page for inspiration

[Fordy]

Originally Posted by vampalan

Does anyone whom is a secondary school student, or know of one, wish to own and do programming on one of these?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oSTHLvfzGM
Was watching the youtube about it, he mentioned cost as a barrier to learning computer programming, yet left out demand, as lots of programming jobs are out sourced to foreign places in big companies in the UK.

Yes. I'm a lower sixth student, pre-ordered one on release day.

[Fordy]

Originally Posted by Madness_3d

Kinda glad I didn't get one now, will wait for a Raspberry Pi 2 and hope the whole platform is a bit more mature

Now where's the fun in that?

[Sloth]

Definitely want to pick one of these up. For the price there's just no reason not to, even if it's not some miracle machine. Thinking it would go well in a simple enclosure mounted to the side of an external USB hard drive. Hard drive plugs into one of the Pi's USB ports, a wireless KB+M plugs into the second, and assuming you can get decent video playback setup you've got a niftly little portable HTPC.

Originally Posted by Fordy

Now where's the fun in that?

And more seriously, who's to say there'll be a Raspberry Pi 2?

It's a learning device first a foremost, and a modder's playground second. For the former not a lot of power or features are needed and most educational institutions aren't going to be looking for a new device now that they've already got one that meets their needs so developments of a Raspberry Pi 2 isn't exactly necessary. For the latter you're dealing with people who enjoy tinkering and making things work, the future of the device will depend largely on their work and creations as its limits and areas needing improvement are discovered.

TL;DR, if you want a Raspberry Pi 2 the best thing you can do is pick one of the first models up and have a go with it. It's cheap and you'll be supporting the creators.

[Cupboard]

Originally Posted by MiNiMaL_FuSS

I'm interested in one as bit-torrent box, would I be able to use a USB hard drive alongside one, or is that asking too much?

Given that you can buy a NAS with a built in bit-torrent client for less than the cost of a Pi, which will work out of the box and look a lot neater, there isn't much of a need to IMO.

Not saying it wouldn't be cool though!

edit: first post in 11 months. Pi is awesome enough to have brought me back, despite the issues that made me leave

[dark_avenger]

Originally Posted by Cupboard

Given that you can buy a NAS with a built in bit-torrent client for less than the cost of a Pi, which will work out of the box and look a lot neater, there isn't much of a need to IMO.

Not saying it wouldn't be cool though!

edit: first post in 11 months. Pi is awesome enough to have brought me back, despite the issues that made me leave

A NAS with bit torrent for less than $35? Seems unlikely....


Already pre ordered one to play around with. Mostly to play with the XBMC port but also looking into whole house audio using a few of them.

[fluxtatic]

Originally Posted by Angel OD

Must... Water Cool... It...

Didn't I already see someone here working on that?