The Raspberry Pi Thread

[smrf]

Well, I am already watching that Pi page for a while. I will be surprised if it will be available before March 2012. But I hope the very best ...

[sje]

Although, for NDA agreement reasons, the graphic chip's registers aren't described.

Broadcom, among others, seems to be afflicted with a bit of paranoia with respect to releasing information needed by third parties who want to write drivers. This has been a problem in Linux Land where only Windows drivers are available for interfacing Broadcom WiFi adapters; the kludge of a solution is to download/build/install a Linux/Windows translation wrapper. Not a big problem for the experienced Linux user, but a sure showstopper for many others.

[sje]

Well, I am already watching that Pi page for a while. I will be surprised if it will be available before March 2012. But I hope the very best ...

It could be much later than March. One post on the Raspberry Pi board suggests that if 50,000 units were available today, then they would all be sold by tomorrow.

As the Raspberry Pi was designed by a British educational charitable group, then it's only fair that the British schoolkids get delivery priority.

Reading through the Raspberry Pi forums, it appears that the number two demand demographic are all the UK adults who grew up with the BBC series of home computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

Indeed, the naming of the Raspberry Pi variants as Model A and Model B stems from the BBC Micro naming of long ago. Note that the BBC machine sold 1.5 million units at ten times the asking price of the far, far more powerful Raspberry Pi board.

Had I been a UK resident back in the early 1980s, I would have had a BBC Micro as well; it certainly would have been a better choice than the machines I used up until I got a Macintosh Plus in late 1986.

[sje]

It's expected that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will be taking orders for the US$35 "B" version of the Raspberry Pi single board computer tomorrow 2012.02.29 (Leap Day). It may be that the entire 10,000 unit initial production run will be sold out in the first day or two based on the mailing list member count and the SD card OS image download count.

There has been a report that a significantly larger second production run will begin once the money from sales of the first is received.

I will start out ordering just one (the per address limit for now) for testing. If the tests go as expected, then I'll get seven more for my clustering experiment. After that, a lot depends on how fast the little guys can deal with bitboard operations. Since the CPU is 32 bits wide and runs at only at 700 MHz, there are limits as to what can be achieved.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

[sje]

Announcement video:

[JuLieN]

I just tried to order one, but the sellers' websites are under heavy traffic...


EDIT: No, really it looks like mission impossible. I guess most of us will have to wait for the second batch....

[sje]

I just tried to order one, but the sellers' websites are under heavy traffic...

EDIT: No, really it looks like mission impossible. I guess most of us will have to wait for the second batch....

The first batch was entirely sold out within two hours. I suspect it would have been sold out in two minutes had not both retailer sites collapsed from the traffic.

The next batch is due on March 26th.

[mhull]

Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

I'm sad to see that no real time clock chip is included. Apparently, a networked Raspberry Pi will have to query a time server as part of the boot sequence soon after a network interface is established. The alternative is to either manually set the date and time or run like it's January 1st, 1970.

Ubuntu is not included in the default set of supported operating systems. This is not too surprising as Ubuntu has gained a lot of bloat over the past few years.

I have been disappointed in recent Ubuntu versions. Maybe it's Linux itself but it's moving too far away from it's roots in my opinion. A lean and mean operating system for experts is what it has been, but their vision seems to be to become the OS that even idiots can use. We already have Windows that even Grandma can check her email and browse the web and socially network.

Am I alone in feeling like this?

Suggestions for a different distribution for me to try? I'm not looking to be a linux guru or make problems for myself, but I just want the OS to get out of the way and stop trying to be the killer application.

Have you tried Kubuntu? The KDE interface is usually less avant garde than its Ubuntu sibling.

[sje]

It appears that the designated merchant of the Raspberry Pi for US residents is at http://www.newark.com/ and currently the board is out of stock. However, the site has a form where one can register their name and email address to be contacted at a later date.

One report states that the current estimated delivery date for new orders has now slipped to mid May.

My apologies if this post sounds like an advertisement; I'm only trying to get the information out so as to save others the time and effort of searching.

[sje]

Allied Electronics is the second of the two US distributors of the Raspberry Pi.

See: http://www.alliedelec.com/RaspberryPi/

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One recent report is that there are over 100,000 people waiting to lay hands on one of these boards, more than ten times the count of the initial production run.