First Impressions of Raspberry Pi

Well a Raspberry Pi arrived in the post today:

These are my first impressions after using it for less than an hour.


Summary


Pros:

Easy to get up and running, no uboot type issues, Debian SD card image works well, comes with LXDE which feels fast, network works out of the box.  Image includes a 3.1.9 kernel.

Sample Debian image is really well designed

Cons:

No obvious serial connection.
Default Debian image needs to be resized for but has a swapfile as the last partition. Easy to fix though.
 
Background:

I used Ubuntu 12.04 on my development PC to load the image. I powered the

Updated uBoot commands, no longer 'mmcinit'

If using Ubuntu ARM 12.04 with a BeagleBoard C3 that has a recent uBoot version on it then

the following suggested command will not work:

setenv bootcmd 'mmc init;fatload mmc 0 0x82000000 boot.scr;source 0x82000000';

  setenv autostart yes; saveenv; boot

Instead you need to convert the "init" to "dev 0", so that it is:

setenv bootcmd 'mmc dev 0;fatload mmc 0 0x82000000 boot.scr;source 0x82000000'; 

  setenv autostart yes; saveenv; boot

This is the new way to set the mmc device.

Exciting new embedded devices for developers (Raspberry Pi and Arduino Due)

The imminent release of two new hardware products are worth getting excited about.

Raspberry Pi

The first is the Raspberry Pi. It comes in two flavours:

The Model A

 The Model B

The best way to describe it is as a $25 (Model B is $35) equivalent of the first BeagleBoard in a smaller form factor hence fewer ports.  It is slated to be available in November 2011. (Note for the Australian and New Zealand audience: It is very likely I will be selling these locally to help avoid shipping costs from the UK. Stay tuned)

PandaBoard Webserver

It is quite easy to run an Intranet or Internet webserver on a PandaBoard running Ubuntu. Therefore this tutorial assumes you are running Ubuntu on your Pandaboard. If you are running from an SD card and have space or speed issues you can always run from a USB harddrive (see my set up here:
http://adventuresinsilicon.blogspot.com/2011/04/pandaboardbeagleboard-how-i-make-my.html )


Running a webserver will allow other users on your network or the Internet to access webpages and anything else you wish to serve such as Nagios statistics, OpenKM servers, security camera footage etc.

For this process I will use Apache running on Ubuntu 10.11.

This also applies to a BeagleBoard running Ubuntu.

HowTo: Run an OpenKM Server on PanadaBoard

This post assumes you are running Ubuntu on your Pandaboard and have access to the Internet Gateway sufficient to allow direct port access between your server and the Internet.

OpenKM is Knowledge Management software which stores files and your chosen metadata around those files.

It acts similar to Sharepoint in the way you can upload, check in, check out, lock documents etc. It has workflow management, search, etc etc

Apache Tip - Realtime view of user access

In preparation for an upcoming post on running a webserver on your BeagleBoard/PandaBoard I stumbled across a handy tip with Apache.

If you are running a default Apache install under Ubuntu you can monitor the access of that webserver in realtime with the following command:

"tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log"

This will automatically update the output in realtime (or close enough for a webserver)

There are other ways to do it with watch for example but this is the easiest way I found to show just the relevant information.