Sunday, 27 May 2012

Raspberry Pi - its's here in volume

The Raspberry Pi's are now shipping in volume and are gradually spreading. The site at raspberrypi.org has links to a map showing the spread worldwide. This post is being edited from a Pi on my desk and using Midori as a lightweight browser.

After all the hype: it works, it runs Debian Squeeze well and can update from Debian apt repositories. Graphics drivers are non-free but I'd hope there would be a way to work together with the development team to get them put into the non-free repositories.

Blogger doesn't like the browser and suggests an update to Google Chrome but that's life, I suppose :(

Saturday, 28 April 2012

Raspberry Pi - shipping in volume

Farnell are now shipping in volume worldwide and will shortly be relaxing the restriction to one Raspberry Pi per customer: RS are also in the process of inviting those with expressions of interest in time order.

The OS of choice is currently Debian - the developers at Broadcom in Cambridge are releasing SD card images fairly regularly at the moment.

There is a large amount of interest worldwide and this before release for education - this can only be good.

[Mine is due week beginning 28 May :) ]

Thursday, 12 April 2012

Raspberry Pi credit card computer - first two thousand shipping

RS and Farnell have started contacting the first wave of customers: some of the first Raspberry Pi boards will be shipping tomorrow and over the weekend.

Similarly, the two distribution companies are ramping up for constant rolling production and mass volume shipping.

Raspberry Pi post

[Courtesy www.raspberrypi.org - Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi foundation which is a registered charity in the UK]

Friday, 6 April 2012

Raspberry Pi ARM credit card computer - update

Still waiting for mine - though I did buy a case for when it comes. News from www.raspberrypi.org - the prototype submitted for EMC testing has apparently passed, though the paperwork has to be validated (blog posting). 
 It has passed CE marking, FCC part 15 marking, Canadian certification and the Australian C-Tick scheme. There is also an updated trademark policy at new trademark rules  ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/trademark-rules ) and a video over at the Farnell/Element14 website from Eben Upton detailing how to set up the Raspberry Pi, shots of booting, explanations of how to use an editor, compile a first Python program and how to build the graphics demos provided. ( http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-44459 )

Saturday, 10 March 2012

Raspberry Pi - three distributions and media centre

Fedora 14 Raspberry Pi Remix now available. Debian 6.0.4 available and Arch Linux port also available. OpenELEC media player distribution has also  been ported to RaspberryPi - first port to ARM - but not yet tested on final production hardware, though working on the alpha boards.

Arch, Debian and Fedora torrenting - and proving very popular. It should be interesting to see how well the Raspberry Pi works in education - in the interim while the first batches go to developers, there will be a huge amount of use. What will be interesting is that this will mean LOTS of Linux hardware in people's hands at affordable prices.

Saturday, 3 March 2012

Raspberry Pi - order

Farnell did take note of the pre-order: I've just had an email asking me to confirm an order. I've just put one in for 30 days delivery ...

A work colleague has also added me to a list he's putting together - this means I might get two :(

Torrent was running at 5.90 sharing ratio a couple of days ago when I stopped it. It's now running at 1.4 share ratio - there's a lot of interest

I put up most of the Debian AMD64 DVDs plus a couple of netinsts at the same time - only a couple of those have reached 1.0 share ratio or better and been deleted.

UPDATE - Using instructions on how to run the image in QEMU, I have managed to get the basic Debian image meant for the RaspberryPI to run on my small i686 laptop.

Well done to the folks at the University of Cambridge who've been using this as a development distribution: Fedora from University of Toronto will follow.
 LXDE, compilers - and all running in 256M :)

Monday, 27 February 2012

Raspberry Pi - announcement

_Something_ is going to happen at 06:00 GMT on 29th February. I predict a server meltdown ..

==

Product available from RS Components and Farnell.com - both servers not responding. Effectively a worldwide DDOS because of demand 29/2/2012

== 07:20 or so ==

Farnell sold out almost immediately: now taking pre-orders for the next batch
RS may be taking orders later in the week. [Per RaspberryPi Twitter feed]

Update: RS are also taking pre-orders and expressions of interest. Both companies will do their best to get stock to all ASAP. 

Please don't blame Eben, Liz or the other RaspberryPi folks for this - they've worked miracles to get this far.

To negotiate proper licensing agreements with the two largest UK electronics distributors and get them to undertake manufacturing and distribution is, actually, a masterstroke for a small non-profit organisation.