Raspberry Pi rolls out speed surge Raspbian OS The Raspberry Pi team has posted its new, recommended Linux distro for its tiny, ARM-based computer. Dubbed Raspbian Wheezy, it's a custom Debian build that, for the first time, taps into the Pi processor's floating point unit for much faster performance. "Users who are still using Debian Squeeze will definitely want to …
I've rapidly come to the conclusion that if you want any sort of UI, the currently available Fedora / Debian Linux distros both run like crap on the Pi. I haven't tried the Mint version. Hopefully this 'Raspbian' distro will go some way towards addressing these performance issues.
I've had most success running RISC OS of all things!
Yup, the last Alpha build of the img (dated 13th of July, I believe) is pretty usable. The SD card read issues have been fixed, and the black bar displayed instead of an icon bar has been rectified.
Chris Hall, Ben Avison, and the rest of the RISC OS RPi porting team deserve a great deal of praise for what they have acheieved in such a relatively hsort space of time.
I didn't think GNOME would even run on the Pi, but even if it did, I wouldn't be daft enough to try it...
With only 256MB RAM to play with (and you'll hit that ceiling quickly, believe me), every MB counts on the Pi, especially if you're running X11. If you really want a Win-type desktop, I'd agree that LXDE is the environment to go for (or IceWM if you desire even less "lard" in the system). Personally, I use Fluxbox, although I'm eyeing up Awesome (tiling WM) once I can work out how to get it to do what I think it should...
Oh, and I too recommend Wicd for managing network connections (esp. if you're adding a USB WiFi adapter to the Pi).
I am looking into buying one of these Raspberry PI's but it appears that when you buy one you have to buy the SD card with the OS separately; someone please correct me if I am wrong as if I am not wrong it seems to me that you are buying a computer without the hard drive and OS that enable it to be (partially) useful.
Yes, they're giving you the opportunity to buy it without the SD card (in case you already have one) and OS (which is freely downloadable). This is called freedom, it's the opposite of what you'll be used to from the computer industry, which is why it might be a little confusing at first. :)
"Perhaps you're not the target market for the Pi. The extra stuff you describe is the sort of gubbins a lot of IT pros and tinkerers have lying around."
REALLY????
Someone should tell those people who brought the Raspberry Pi to market then because they have been spouting the most misguided guff about reinvigorating the youth market into exploring computers in the way the BBC computer did in the Early Upper Silicon Age.
When everyone is done being snotty and/or superior, perhaps they could direct the questioning troll to the Pi website where it is all explained in small words.
Because the designers clearly DO expect people like this to show an interest.
Sorry Bill Smith 1, I don't think you will get much sympathy on here.
The Pi is pretty obviously what it is. I have one, but didn't need to buy an SD card (cos I have loads knocking around), the OS is free (same as for normal computers if you choose linux and aren't forced to have windows by the shop), I had a keyboard (several actually), I had a mouse (again, several) and I have a couple of spare ports on my router too.
I was aware of what I needed, and even if I didn't have it, you can buy all that stuff at the same time.
Your analogy makes no sense, because it doesn't sound like you have a PC at all. You have a case and a processor. If you had a case, processor and motherboard then I may consider it, as I am looking to uprate my server. What processor are you selling?
Seriously though, The Raspberry Pi is a refreshing change to the establishment. It isn't a replacement for a full PC system but it is very handy for hobbyists and hopefully for kids (though I see more old-school coders using it).
Really? If you don't have a spare keyboard, mouse and an SD card sitting around the place then you aren't the kind of person who would want to be tinkering with Pi anyway. You'll probably be back here complaining that you can't install Windows on it and that it won't run Office.
No. "Freedom" here means you are free to choose whether or not to pay extra for stuff you may or may not need. What were you expecting, for crying out loud?
I already have a stash of various sizes of SD cards, a few USB keyboards, more Internet cables than I know what to do with (plus, in case I run out, a pair of RJ45 crimpers that also do the RJ11/12 plugs used internationally in telecomms -- bought so I could interface to a TDM422 telephony card when I was experimenting with Asterisk) and I can borrow the HDMI cable from my DVD recorder (I'll just have to live with the old SCART connection for awhile; the set only has two HDMI inputs and the recorder is only low-definition anyway) and two micro-USB cables (one supplied with my Kobo E-Reader, and one supplied with my phone). I also have two mains-to-5V USB PSUs -- one from the phone, and one which was a Christmas present along with the Kobo. Nonetheless, I ordered a wall wart for the Raspberry Pi anyway.
Have you ever considered that you just might not be the target market for the Raspberry Pi?
> it seems to me that you are buying a computer without the hard drive and OS
What you get is a naked "motherboard". You have to provide the following:
Power supply
USB Keyboard (the £2.50 ASDA jobbie works OK)
USB Mouse (as does their cheap mouse)
Display, usually an HDMI TV and a connecting cable
SD card that you download an OS for and then need to use a PC to copy the OS to the card
Network cable to plug into your home router
Something non-metallic to put all this stuff on. The 'Pi doesn't have any mounting holes and is quite small and lightweight, so stopping it from dragging when you move a cable is not easy.
And since the 'Pi only has 2 USB ports, you might need a USB hub - though since the 'Pi's ability to use peripherals is strictly limited (none of the 4 different types of webcam I've tried have worked on it) there may not be much scope for this.
"Something non-metallic to put all this stuff on. The 'Pi doesn't have any mounting holes and is quite small and lightweight, so stopping it from dragging when you move a cable is not easy."
I am shocked and horrified. The FSM gave us Sugru and hot glue guns for a reason. This is a device for people with at least a shred of ingenuity; it's kinda the point :D
Sugru is pretty good, but it has a crappy shelf life. I bought two packs of it but 90% of it had cured by the time I got round to using it (6 months or so after purchase). I've had reasonable success making an alternative out of silicone bathroom sealant and corn flour (make sure it's proper corn flour, not finely milled wheat flour as seems common). You can find instructions if you search for "make your own sugru" which will then point you to loads of DIY sites.
You don't have to buy an SD card with your Raspberry Pi, just as you don't have to buy a power supply with it. However, so many problems have been reported with SD cards and power supplies that it's probably a good idea to buy them together so you can stick it to the vendor if there are any problems.
Why are you questioning the choices for a system which is not aimed at end users?
The current device is designed for early adopters who will be providing services for this device, people producing cases, peripherals and education support services.
It is a development machine for experienced "hackers". The more consumer friendly release will follow later where the device will be cased and come with some software (probably).
So the only worthwhile improvements are in:
1) MP3 decoding (which R-Pi is plenty fast enough to do already)
2) x264 encoding (let's face it, R-Pi is hardly going to be the platform of choice for video transcoding even with the 37% speed boost)
Quake benchmark is probably the most realistic one to get a measure of the amount of improvement we are likely to see on average, with a hardly earth shattering 8%.
An interesting project, sure, but realistically, a waste of time considering the minimal improvements - except for those wanting to use the R-Pi for a lot of A/V transcoding (which will still be too slow for practical use anyway).
The one on the video is overclocked and crucially overvolted to run at 1Ghz. However, if you read the R Pi forum threads there are a number of people who have only put mild overclock without overvolting and are still finding significant speed benefits. My Pi is apparently in the post, so I shall be trying this in the next day or so.
Oh, and Bill Smith 1 is either trolling (in which case don't feed the troll) or hasn't read the website to find out what the R Pi foundation are trying to do (and hence the reason it's sold without peripherals).
Agree, plus this means yet another architecture and another repo that may or not may be kept in sync with the Debian main. (yes I know I can compile my own packages, but that's not as user friendly)
Then bc benchmark is even slower in this, maybe due to a claimed gcc optimisation bug, so that's another thing to watch out.
Think I'll stick with the real Debian for now. The biggest slow down is lack of any X11 acceleration, which this doesn't really address.
"yes I know I can compile my own packages, but that's not as user friendly"
This is one of the fundamental things the Raspberry foundation produced the pi for.
Back in the day, you bought a computer, powered it up and you was greeted with a not very user friendly flashing cursor. You had to program it to do stuff... Most of the time there was very little in the way of commercial software so people got hold of a programming manual and started to learn how to code. If you wanted to attach hardware, you had to program your own drivers. Here in the UK we produced a LOT of talented programmers !
Modern computers, you power it on and there is a whole host of apps to do what you need it to do, already installed. If there was no app installed, a quick qoogle session and you install some software. Nobody needed to learn how to do anything anymore... particularly as programming packages and development kits became more and more expensive.
my point is the pi is not just a device developed for people to learn to program on, it's a device to learn all aspects of computing, Compile software from source... learn the languages of the source code.
computers are not supposed to be user friendly.
I agree with you Marty, but that's not the point here. Compiling source code packages of a Linux distro is not the same as programming or actually even educative beyond the first few times.
I'd love if the foundation would release a bare metal package and tutorial for people who want to mess around with it. Things like the GPU blob should be documented too.
One of the good things we had in the past was great documentation, in the form of books such as The Advanced User Guide for the BBC Micro or The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly. Nowadays no one documents anything and it's all left to reverse engineer for other sources.
No, you are not correct. The whole kernel and associated packages have been recompiled for Hard float so anything that uses floating point is much faster. In addition there are some custom implementations of some memory functions that have greatly improved the speed of the desktop. Also, there is more sophisticated first time config system for first boot to set up the system for beginners.
The Quake benchmark won't be overly affect by these changes as its OpenGLES and runs mainly on the GPU., Overclocking will help there.
Did you actually read anything about this release before posting?
to ,er, play devils advocate here,
I think its great that people are tinkering with these things , and that school kids can get a grasp of the real low level architecture - and that programming dosent just mean setting up your own facebook page. (how many kids will go for it though?)
but I , Like the kids , want to see results fast, (i've done a bit of assembly and other stuff , i get it, i dont really wanna go back)
If wanted to make it into a touch screen mp3 player for my car ( i already have the hardware for this) how the hell would you go about that? in this "arm based SoC" wtf that means.
I'd rather get a laptop , a cut down version of winxp , and download the already existing front ends OR maybe program the front end mysself in vb, just to get it how i want it.
a *more* impatient person wouls just use a slab these days.
so what am i rambling about? i dunno i guess i'm saying it needs a very special person to be intrested, I'm special , but not that special.
another thing - its great that its 2" sqare or whatever , but when youve put kbd,mouse n LCD tv on it , its a lot less portable than a , well , anything
wheres the "dont hit me!" icon ?
But I think the point is most of the programming has already been done for you on the mp3 player, all the low level hardware stuff anyway. Someone somewhere needs to know how to do this, and he probably tinkered around with a BBC micro etc etc. This is what the RPi foundation are trying to encorage.
and there was me thinking it was a perfectly reasonable question/statement.
I have spares (I tinker a lot with the Arduino) so I sourcing the SD isnt a problem; however, I still think that paying for something that does nothing unless you add to it is a tad silly.
So 'box shifter' & 'shinny shinny'; all you do is highlight your elitist twat status (which you obviously work soooo hard to maintain).
You say that you use Arduino which does nothing unless you add to it. So you have experience of the same set up for the Pi. The Pi is just about the same as the Arduino, maybe not the IO capabilities, maybe not the same robustness, but it can still be easily programmed using Scratch or Python. My wife bought one to learn more about programming at a lower level - she is a mainframe programmer. Perfectly suited to her.
My wife bought one to learn more about programming at a lower level
Serious question. Why buy a Raspberry Pi to do that, rather than a cheap Linux box (any old PC for £25 on eBay) or use a virtual machine (free)? I can see lots of uses for a Pi, but they all involve embedding small computers in mobile devices of one sort or another. As a programming tool per se I can't see the point at all. Scratch is free for Windows, Mac or Linux. So is Python. If you need another computer to program, why not buy one with decent storage and performance?
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For people with their own incomes, and the time & knowledge to set this sort of thing up, hacking on an existing home computer or dedicated VM is fine. However, this assumes people are comfortable tinkering with their home PCs, and have permission to do so. For a lot of schoolchildren, though, the home PC is expensive, runs Windows only, and is not to be modified or broken on pain of death.
Now consider the Pi. Given the size & price point, schools can reasonably equip entire year-groups with these, even allowing the students to take them home for homework/coursework use. Teaching materials can be created with the knowledge that the entire target audience is running common hardware and software. Teachers and IT departments can rest assured that unless a device is physically broken, it can always be fixed by re-imaging the SD card. The educational release later in the year will have a case, instead of being just a board, and quite probably some printed reference material.
It's a fine device for tinkerers, which is why I have two, but let's not forget what it's really being aimed at.
yeah its almost like selling something without batterys, that never happens...
and don't get me started on those fscking suitcase makers. just bought a new one and imagine my suprise when i arrived at the hotel,opened it and there was nothing inside! how dare they sell something like that expecting me to add to it. everyone elses had stuff inside yet i payed for mine and it was empty, thieving gits.
Not only does it not come with retina display monitor, power supply, keyboard, mouse or storage device
But when I tried to load in Uncharted 3 there was nowhere for the DVD to fit in
Neither can I play my F-Zero SNES Cart
Disgraceful. They have £30 or so of my heard earned pounds for this !
Disgraceful
Unfortunately, they're probably not even trolls. I think most of them actually mean it.
Let's not let "troll" come to mean just "angry" or "stupid", & slide off down the same slippery slope that "begs the question" slid down (or even worse "tow the line").
Mine was to control a 3d printer originally, but my kid crashed her grandfather's car and that 3d printer turned into an impact absorbing front bumper assembly, a radiator core, sundry hoses and some dent-dinging.
Stil, no-one was hurt except the mechanic who lost both eardrums when he presented me the Bill.
But the Pi si seriously underpowered IMHO.
I shall be contemplating the ODROID-X, personally, as the Pi feels like a step backwards from the sheevaplug I bought a few years ago. I know, these are different use-cases to the Pi, but I can't actually think of much I'd want to do with the Pi. Most Pi users seem to want to use it as a media streaming/cheap desktop box anyway, for which it seems pretty underpowered.
I don't understand why there's so much hatred for the Pi coming from some people. Yes, the media hype got a bit ridiculous at times, but if you actually read the Foundation's website, as far as I can tell they've always been open & honest about exactly what the device is. Their only fault, perhaps, is in not stating firmly enough that the initial release, minus case & manual, was supposed to be aimed at developers. For example, anyone moaning about performance ought to read the following bit of the FAQ:
"That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics."
Sounds about right to me, with the possible exception that you only really get that performance via OpenGL ES or hardware video decoding, not currently via your average 2D X desktop. Bear in mind that OpenGL ES is the same 3D graphics API found in Android and various other mobile/embedded things; it's worth learning in this day & age if you want to program for that sort of thing.
Anyway, mine do get used (not a typo, I have two - ordered one from RS, and one from Farnell). One sits in front of the TV and runs XBMC, with the SD card occasionally getting swapped out for me to tinker with some graphics programming; the second is going to be turned into a NAS box, and maybe a few other kinds of light-load server, since I don't currently have an always-on box at home.
I must remember to check the RasPi forum, to see if there's any chance of these improvements being ported to Arch Linux ARM. Anything which might light an extra fire (metaphorically speaking) under my Pi, wouldn't hurt...
Still holding out for an X server which hooks into the Pi's GPU, though - that's the Holy Grail :-)
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