18 replies to this topic

[barnieg]

Reading this interview the Raspberry Pi Foundation might be onto something Q&A: Eben Upton from The Raspberry Pi Foundation they might just be on to something, in School and College I learnt programming with hands on systems hopefully this will be something along those lines

Barnie

[mimo]

I think the idea is great, David Braben is totally correct IMO that the current IT courses taught in UK schools are little more than learning how to type and how to use software that already exists.
Would be great to see real computer science taught at an early age, peeling back the onion skin so to speak with removing all the bloat and actually programming the computer.

As for me, well I want to buy at least two, one to play around with at home and the other for the basis of an in car computer.

[amiman99]

I new about it for few months now, looks like I will get it, very nice project.

[Rex Dart]

Pretty cool, but I still holdthat there are a bunch of similar (note: didn't say identical) offerings out there.

[theloon]

I suspect only the $35 dollar version with more memory will be usable. They claim 10,000 units ready for December but that's gonna be offered in smaller batches - supposedly to let early adopters find the glaring bugs

I just bought a PC (eBox-3350) running XP that can be powered by ONE USB plug for about $180. That will keep me satisfied until I can have my Pi.

Edited by theloon, Fri Nov 4, 2011 4:27 PM.

[Tickled_Pink]

Latest is that they're about 3 weeks behind the original planned release, which isn't bad. I question their use of Linux as an OS, though. I know there's a lot of support for Linux in the industry but c'mon ... if one of your stated aims is to start a new breed of computer programmer, like the old days, the last thing you want to do is include a heavy-duty OS that puts newcomers off. Heck - I've been developing for 25 years and I still can't get to grips with Linux. I honestly can't stand the bloody thing.

Just hope the GUI and API, assuming there is one, makes things a little easier.

[RevEng]

Given it's ARM based, what would have been a better choice?

[Tickled_Pink]

RevEng, on Fri Dec 23, 2011 4:31 PM, said:

Given it's ARM based, what would have been a better choice?

ANYTHING! Seriously, though, there are others that would have been better suited for including into what could effectively be the first true home computer for 20 years. RiscOS would have been nice.

What I mean is that for such a relatively simple system, they should have put together a relatively simple OS. Something that budding hobbyists and tech freaks can get their teeth into. Given that it's ARM based, would it have been so difficult to have written a simple but effective OS in ARM assembler? I suppose one reason for going for Linux is that they wanted something they could just quickly hack into place. I hope it'll be possible to replace the OS in ROM, but I doubt it.

Edit: Ha! Just taken a look at Wikipedia and according to that (I'd just read a news article on the BBC website today) it's designed to work with Linux or RiscOS.

Edited by Tickled_Pink, Fri Dec 23, 2011 6:05 PM.

[RevEng]

I hear where you're coming from, but writing a simple and effective OS from scratch would have limited options and held the project up. As it stands, there are tons of compilers and interpreters ready to deploy.

The good news is it boots from an SD card, so there's no reason why the userspace look-and-feel has to be traditional Linux with gnu. (or RiscOS) I'm pretty sure we'll see all kinds of specialty boot images. Heck, if someone has the means and skill they can even port Windows CE. (though they wouldn't be able to distribute it)

Personally I'm planning to have one that boots to a Mame front-end (after the kernel and some minimal daemons have booted) for a mini-cabinet setup.

[Tickled_Pink]

RevEng, on Fri Dec 23, 2011 7:31 PM, said:

Personally I'm planning to have one that boots to a Mame front-end (after the kernel and some minimal daemons have booted) for a mini-cabinet setup.

That's a great idea. Would the MAME sources have to be rebuilt for it?

[RevEng]

Probably not, though it depends on which distribution you use and what packages they've built for you. Debian Linux will be the officially bundled distribution, and looking at the Debian Linux arm package list from my guru-plug server, a prebuilt mame package is provided...

root@debian:~# apt-cache search mame
kamefu - KDE All Machine Emulator Frontend for Unix - binary files
kamefu-data - Data files for Kamefu
libkamefu-dev - Development headers for Kamefu
libkamefu0 - Libraries for Kamefu
kxmame - A KDE frontend for xmame emulator
xmame-common - Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
xmame-gl - dummy package
xmame-sdl - SDL binaries for the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
xmame-tools - Tools for xmame and xmess
xmame-x - X binaries for the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
xmess-common - Support files for the Multi Emulator Super System
xmess-sdl - SDL binaries for the Multi Emulator Super System
xmess-x - X binaries for the Multi Emulator Super System

[Hatta]

The choice of Linux allows this to be more than a toy. Yes, they could have built a custom OS, but the skills learned there wouldn't translate to anything else. Put Linux on it, and whatever you learn can be directly applied to all sorts of environments. This also means that there will be thousands of packages available on day one.

The only real problem with these devices is that the SoC they use is proprietary. You don't get to write your own video drivers for this thing. You have to take the binary blob they give you. They really should have pushed for something better.

As for RiscOS, it's not open source so it's rightfully off the table from the start.

[sack-c0s]

Tickled_Pink, on Fri Dec 23, 2011 6:02 PM, said:

Edit: Ha! Just taken a look at Wikipedia and according to that (I'd just read a news article on the BBC website today) it's designed to work with Linux or RiscOS.

Which means if you hit F12 and type *basic you end up with something not unlike a BBC B on steroids (or as I like to think of it 'a damn good macro assembler')

[RevEng]

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced they'll have big news in under 7 hours.

Most people are expecting this to be when the first batch (about 10,000 units) is actually on sale.

[theloon]

Big news is they blew it on a newbie move. Never go public with such small quntities with clueless distributors when you've been hyped for so long. Save your first 10,000 on developers and quietly parcel them out. Let the software mature enough that kids and adult kids (end-users) can actively use it. THEN go public with a bigger distributer that can handle worldwide orders. Live and learn I guess.

..just to be clear I CONSIDER MYSELF one of those adult kid end-users when it comes to Debian on an ARM architechture

In other news, the ebay fraudsters have started. I saw one guy hours after ordering time selling his pre-order ticket.

[RevEng]

theloon, on Thu Mar 1, 2012 2:02 AM, said:

Big news is they blew it on a newbie move. Never go public with such small quantities with clueless distributors when you've been hyped for so long.

Yeah, and don't change your announced sales plan during your early-morning-wake-up-get-em event. They had previously said they didn't want to use the distributor+royalty model, and they did an about face on that. It's the right decision (it breaks the 10k units per batch limit) but the last second communication just added to the confusion.

And despite claims that RP would be available globally, the distributors they linked to didn't sell to North American customers - it will be available for NA through Newark and Aliied Electronics, but they didn't share that tidbit at launch, when their linked distributors were being brought to their knees.

But these are mistakes of naivety, and easily forgotten. After all they're a charity, and a new one at that.

It's going to be one-per-customer for a month or two, so I think I'll actually wait a bit longer to save on shipping and let them get their act together.

On the bright side, they said the $25 unit will also have 256M, like the $35 unit. I think its cheaper for them to produce it that way.

[akator]

I just received an email from Newark Element 14 with a link to purchase, so I ordered one. A confirmation email followed, so maybe it is actually happening. I'm not getting my hopes up until it actually arrives, though

[akator]

I was right not to get my hopes up. Another confirmation email arrived with a ship date of May 14. I suppose I should consider myself lucky to get one at all...

[RevEng]

Yeah, even at +2 months you may be one of the lucky minority.

I expect at this point the partners have multiple manufacturing orders out, but the lack of availability has resulted in even more media hype. If there were geeks that didn't know about this thing before, they certainly know now.