Friday, October 05, 2012

Blogging from a Raspberry Pi board

I've plugged an Ethernet cable into the Raspberry Pi and brought up the Midori web browser (which I had previously never heard of). As a web-browsing experience, the RPi is extremely slow, but it works. Google's new authentication scheme is a little dubious about Midori, not too surprising. But it rendered Facebook readably and I was able to look at some of my pictures on Flickr.

I intend to find some interesting hardware hack for the board, probably a musical instrument of some sort. Of course it won't be running X Windows at that point. If I get ambitious I might try to figure out how to create a stripped-down X-less Raspian distribution. I've done a little bit of distro hacking on Ubuntu in the past.

Even without X, I'm concerned about performance issues. Linux is not normally used for real-time use, but apparently I'm not the first person to wonder if that's feasible. Well I think I've exhausted my patience here.

Back on a normal computer. That was interesting, but enough is enough. Any RPi hacking that reaches a state of readiness for public consumption will be posted on Github, and notifications will appear here.

Before I forget, one handy note to other Yanks thrown by Raspian's curious keyboard mapping. You might have skipped over most of the options in raspi-config as I did (the first thing that appears on your screen after all those boot messages finish). Look for "keyboard configuration" and look for the canonical U.S. keyboard choices.
Here's a custom search engine for Raspberry Pi stuff, courtesy of Google.

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