[CiDeRmAn]

Or you'll do what you normally do and end up collecting a stack of the devices, just 'cos you can..
Consider me, and others, a de-clutter service, it's your mental health we're concerned about!

[Steve SI]

Originally Posted by Dale Parish

Been a good few years since I used Linux; I remember there being a package manager (sort of like iTunes), where is that on this one?

You need to install it from a terminal window(or before you run "startx").

This is the command to download and install it:
sudo apt-get -y install synaptic

.

[Steve SI]

Originally Posted by CiDeRmAn

Or you'll do what you normally do and end up collecting a stack of the devices, just 'cos you can..
Consider me, and others, a de-clutter service, it's your mental health we're concerned about!

That ship sailed a long time ago
My girlfriend is almost a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist and she cant fix me so I guess it's time to embrace the madness.

.

[waveform]

Steve you legend! I really really appreciate you posting those commands, VNC is the very next essential software I want to get on the pi, and that will save me a lot of time.

One of my favourite things so far on my noob Linux/PI journey one single command in Arch Linux:
"pacman - syu"
Which downloads and install all the recent packages, and even the latest RaspberryPi firmware all in one go!
Man having it update the distro and flash the firmware in one single command is seriously impressive!

I'm beginning to love the idea of linux already!

[EnterNow]

[Steve SI]

Originally Posted by waveform

Steve you legend! I really really appreciate you posting those commands, VNC is the very next essential software I want to get on the pi, and that will save me a lot of time.

One of my favourite things so far on my noob Linux/PI journey one single command in Arch Linux:
"pacman - syu"
Which downloads and install all the recent packages, and even the latest RaspberryPi firmware all in one go!
Man having it update the distro and flash the firmware in one single command is seriously impressive!

I'm beginning to love the idea of linux already!

Yeah, Linux has it's place and can be great.
You using Arch linux on it? I'm on Debian.

.

[Dale Parish]

Ah yes, ye olde sudo apt-get.. I remember why I stopped using Linux now!
Someone should develop a commercial but really good OS for this...

[waveform]

Originally Posted by EnterNow

Originally Posted by Steve SI

Yeah, Linux has it's place and can be great.
You using Arch linux on it? I'm on Debian.

.

I have Debian on my main SD card, and Arch on the smaller one.

Was worth putting on Arch alone to update the firmware, but now it appears the updated Debian image put up a few days ago, has an updated firmware package included also, as well as an Alpha Audio driver,
not sure if it flashes automatically on boot up though.

Arch Linux will be too advanced for me I think, as it's tailor made and comes with new GUI, and you have to install each individual package yourself.

I need to actually learn how to use linux first, before I can make my own customized build of it!

[Steve SI]

Originally Posted by Dale Parish

Ah yes, ye olde sudo apt-get.. I remember why I stopped using Linux now!
Someone should develop a commercial but really good OS for this...

Ubuntu would be a great OS for beginners and pros alike but they dropped support for the PI before it was even manufactured. They said the Pi was just to underpowered to run the OS, and they were right, it needs a slimline OS to really be of any use to anyone.

Lets not forget, this thing is cheap as chips and costs the same amount of money as I spend on morning coffee in a week on the way to work, about 30 Euro.
It's a great little thing to play around with and try to get the max performance out of it but I'd hate to have to live with it as my only pc

.

[Dale Parish]

Machine needs a C&C95 port..

[waveform]

Originally Posted by Steve SI

It's a great little thing to play around with and try to get the max performance out of it but I'd hate to have to live with it as my only pc
.

You know I was wondering earlier today about the possibility of Broadcom having a more powerful version of the BCM2385 on the way, with a similar price.

While that's pure speculation, it would be cool if say one was released with twice the RAM and a second core in time for the education release, not that Broadcomm are specifically manufacturing these chips with charity in mind.

That's purely Pi in the sky thinking there, but wouldn't it be great!

At the exponential rate PC component become faster and cheaper to produce, hopefully in the near future we'll see a nicer spec for the same price comes.


It makes me wonder if the likes of Apple and other corporations would get in on this miniature PC concept idea in a few years time if it takes off,
especially with kids in mind, to improve their image.

The reality is that they would be too focussed on ease of use devices like the iphone / ipad, where touchscreens are king.


And on second thought the likes of cheap chinese Android tablets are offering superior I/O connectivity per buck, with USB 2.0 OTG, hdmi out, memory card slots etc...

Apple are a bitch for their proprietary (so we can charge you more) connectors, so i could never really see them getting into this cheap PC concept at all.

Apologies for the weird post, couldn't get to sleep last night!

[Steve SI]

Originally Posted by waveform

You know I was wondering earlier today about the possibility of Broadcom having a more powerful version of the BCM2385 on the way, with a similar price.

While that's pure speculation, it would be cool if say one was released with twice the RAM and a second core in time for the education release, not that Broadcomm are specifically manufacturing these chips with charity in mind.

That's purely Pi in the sky thinking there, but wouldn't it be great!

At the exponential rate PC component become faster and cheaper to produce, hopefully in the near future we'll see a nicer spec for the same price comes.


It makes me wonder if the likes of Apple and other corporations would get in on this miniature PC concept idea in a few years time if it takes off,
especially with kids in mind, to improve their image.

The reality is that they would be too focussed on ease of use devices like the iphone / ipad, where touchscreens are king.

As for a more powerful Broadcom/ARM setup, well it already exists. The ARM chip in this Pi is a couple of generations old and the reason it's in there is its cheap, powerful enough(the GPU anyway) and Eben was able to negotiate a great price for a bulk load of them(his day job is at Broadcom).

The ram is low because of costs and costs alone. The model A board that's coming soon is cheaper and was supposed to have only 128MB of ram instead of the 256MB in the B boards we have. But they managed to negotiate a price on them and now the A and B boards have the same RAM, which is great(think its just the NIC thats missing on the A now).

I have a feeling that this Raspberry Pi might lead some people on to larger more expensive boards like the pandaboard and its ilk. Which is a great thing to get people interested in these kinds of projects but you'll find it hard to get something as small and relatively powerful as the Pi and keep the price so so low. Only a non profit can do it I suppose as they aren't interested in turning a direct profit.

Anyway, I can nerd blab on about this all night but I think you know what I mean

.

[Dale Parish]

In reality 256mb of RAM is a LOT. Look what could be done on an XT or a C64.

[The Last Bandit]

Meh, ye still have it too easy. In my day you had to wire wrap your own designed board, write everything in assembler and erase eproms purely by staring at them

Great project, keep up the good work.

Its a pity HDMI can't supply enough juice to power one of this, I'd love to see one fitted inside an Atari 2600 controller (or similar) running Mame and connected directly to HDMI port on telly

[Steve SI]

I just cheated on my Pi
And ordered an Pandaboard ES to play around with. It's also going in an as yet to be decided retro system to power more resource hungry emulators.



Specs:

Core Logic OMAP4460 applications processor

Dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ with Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) at up to 1.2 GHz each.
Full HD (1080p) multi-standard video encode/decode
Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR™ SGX540 graphics core supporting all major API's including OpenGL® ES v2.0, OpenGL ES v1.1, OpenVG v1.1 and EGL v1.3 and delivering 2x sustained performance compared to the previous SGX530 core
Low power audio

Memory

1 GB low power DDR2 RAM
Full size SD/MMC card cage with support for High-Speed & High-Capacity SD cards


Display

HDMI v1.3 Connector (Type A) to drive HD displays
DVI-D Connector (can drive a 2nd display, simultaneous display; requires HDMI to DVI-D adapter)
LCD expansion header
DSI Support

Audio

3.5" Audio in/out
HDMI Audio out
Stereo audio input support

Connectivity

Onboard 10/100 Ethernet
Wireless Connectivity
802.11 b/g/n (based on WiLink™ 6.0)
Bluetooth® v2.1 + EDR (based on WiLink™ 6.0). Bluetooth Low Energy Capable.
1x USB 2.0 High-Speed On-the-go port
2x USB 2.0 High-Speed host ports
General purpose expansion header (I2C, GPMC, USB, MMC, DSS, ETM)
Camera expansion header
LCD signal expansion using a single set of resistor banks

Debug

JTAG
UART/RS-232
2 status LEDs (configurable)
1 GPIO Button
Sysboot switch available on board

Dimensions

Height: 114,3 mm
Width: 101,6 mm
Weight: 82 grams

I'm still loyal to the Pi but this just something else to experiment with.

.