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Gauging Opinion on the Raspberry Pi

WMH

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 26, 2011
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425
Location
Florida
Hey guys,

Lately I've been doing some toying with the Raspberry Pi. See here (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) if you haven't heard about it yet.

I think it's a great machine, and it can really change things if it ends up in the right hands.

But I wanted to gauge opinion on it here; what do you guys think about it?

<discussion>
 
It's inexpensive, well-built, and works as advertised. The downside is that the software has a ways to go with respect to being tailored to the hardware's capabilities, but then I haven't had a chance to try the new optimized build, so that might be better.
 
I got one a few months ago.

It gets used occasionally as a Living room computer for the likes of youtube. Though my broadband speed can't really handle full HD video, it just about manages to keep up.

With a full GUI the Fedora build can be slow, though just using bash shell the speed is fine.

I sometimes wonder what DSL (as in Damn Small Linux, not Digital Subscriber Line!) would be like running on it.

For the occasional coding, playing about, plugging it into a big TV using HDMI, it is fine. Some benchmarks liken the speed to a Pentium 2.
 
It's inexpensive, well-built, and works as advertised. The downside is that the software has a ways to go with respect to being tailored to the hardware's capabilities, but then I haven't had a chance to try the new optimized build, so that might be better.

I agree with that. However, the optimized build is probably better (I haven't tried the original so I wouldn't know :) )

I got one a few months ago.

It gets used occasionally as a Living room computer for the likes of youtube. Though my broadband speed can't really handle full HD video, it just about manages to keep up.

With a full GUI the Fedora build can be slow, though just using bash shell the speed is fine.

I sometimes wonder what DSL (as in Damn Small Linux, not Digital Subscriber Line!) would be like running on it.

For the occasional coding, playing about, plugging it into a big TV using HDMI, it is fine. Some benchmarks liken the speed to a Pentium 2.

I use bash, too. The GUI can be pretty slow with more than a couple of windows.

I decided to push the limits on the Raspberry Pi I was borrowing. I installed telnetd, mutt, micro-httpd, and a lot of other things. What have you guys done with yours?
 
It's inexpensive, well-built, and works as advertised. The downside is that the software has a ways to go with respect to being tailored to the hardware's capabilities, but then I haven't had a chance to try the new optimized build, so that might be better.

Unfortunately it can't be said that it works as advertised, unless "broken USB subsystem" was something I missed: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/29
 
No USB problems at all with mine. Use it as a NAS. SAMBA and 4 USB connected hard drives. Never dropped off line. Of course, I don't use LXDE. This is all bash command line stuff.
 
While I don't have one, the only use I myself would have for one would be running a small file server, but not with the cheap drives powered by USB.

My idea for this has always been use 2 or 3 of the cheap JMicron based USB to IDE\SATA adapters, they've been fairly reliable and I've used both USB and SATA devices at once with them, Bandwidth isn't something I'm concerned with as I only use 100 Mb/s ethernet anyways. For power an old AT style power supply modified to only have the molex connectors for hard drives, there shouldn't be any load issues as I've only had one power supply that wouldn't fire up with one hard drive load (I needed 6 before it turned on, I thought it was dead before that). As for the USB power, most AT power supplies had a port for the monitor power, I've seen adapters to take that to a standard power plug, and that with an old cell phone charger=cheap file server.

The reason why I don't do this is I get around fine using the old 100+ gig IDE disks and my USB to IDE\SATA adapter, as I know what's on what disk.
 
Someone ported XBMC to it which is what I'd be tempted to use it for. I'm not clear on the issue that were run into with USB I Thought it was related to devices that zap a lot of power via USB though. I could be wrong.. obviously I don't have one and in another thread it sounded like a person complaining had first hand experience.

GUI of course would be expected to drag ass. Linux GUIs have sorta sucked the last 10 years and become resource hogs. My main system died a few weeks ago and I'm debating building something else for an XBMC type server.. probably worth checking out. Does anyone here have one they'd like to sell?
 
A few (many?) of Pi owners doesn't have any problem with usb - it works as advertised.
I suspect that this problem has something to do with the specific devices being used.

This is true, the problem is that the list of specific USB devices which are known to cause problems with the Raspberry Pi includes most, if not all, USB hubs.
 
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