The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little computer for the price and it
will no doubt spawn thousands of cool ways to use this $38 marvel.
Rather than just review the Pi like everyone else, we wanted to go one
better, so we created our own Linux distro specifically built for the
Raspberry Pi.
There are a small number of Linux releases available for the Pi, but they’re either function-specific like raspbmc or they’re focused in a particular direction, like the education/programming focus of the new official Debian Wheezy release. Don’t get us wrong — the official release with its HFP support for the Pi’s BCM2835 CPU is fantastic. However, it uses the LXDE desktop environment and as a long-time fan of Xfce, I personally wanted to see if we could get something more rounded up and running. APC piLinux for Raspberry Pi is the result.
We’ve given the Xfce4 desktop a simple APC blue background image and customised the taskbar to include our own APC ‘Start’ button called ‘Applications’. We’ve also included a CPU monitor. This will be important because let’s face it, 700MHz isn’t a lot of clock speed to play with and some apps like web browsing will smack into the CPU performance end stops. The CPU monitor gives you a quick visual on the CPU load — if it’s a solid blue block, ease up a bit on what you’re doing and wait for the CPU to calm down again before doing the next task.
The four blocks on the taskbar will allow you to run four different desktops. That means instead of cluttering all of your open apps onto one desktop, you can move them across four and spread out, a bit like having four monitors, but without using up all that desk space.
If you’ve played with any of the UserOS Linux distros I built for PC User, you should find this one pretty similar to use. Even if you haven’t, if you can use Windows, you should be able to drive this one.
Again, the first time you launch Iceweasel will be the slowest and it will speed up a little after that.
Load the SD card with APC piLinux on it into your Windows computer with Windows Explorer and you’ll see the 64MB partition. Inside, you’ll see four ‘start.elf’ files. These are the bootloaders that control that memory allocation when the Pi boots up each time.
We’ve set the default split to 192/64MB (CPU/GPU) because the GPU requires 64MB of memory for the video buffer in order to play back 1080p video. If you’re not interested in video, you can gain a little extra speed by selecting a 224/32MB CPU/GPU split. To do that, delete ‘start.elf’, make a copy of ‘arm224_start.elf’ and rename it ‘start.elf’. When you’re done, plug the card back into your Pi, boot up and it’ll tell you the changed RAM split.
You also get access to Debian Squeeze’s 25,000+ app repository through the Terminal-based apt app. Just plug the Pi into your home network and you’re away.
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There’s no storage on board, but you can supply up to 64GB through the SecureDigital card slot on the underside of the board, which also supplies the bootup mechanism and the operating system you run.
Importantly, though, you don’t need ARMv6/HFP to play back 1080p H.264 video — while you do need to keep the overall video bit rate down to around 3.5Mbps, the Pi will do the job on the standard ARMv6 Debian release.
You can use any SD card 2GB or larger, although we’d recommend an 8GB card (they’re cheap enough) and one that’s at least Class 6 in speed.
Starting the Pi is pretty simple — there’s no power button or reset button. You simply add power to the microUSB port to power up and remove it to power off or reset.
The Pi has two USB 2.0 ports, although they’re currently limited to 140mA each, whereas the standard USB 2.0 port usually delivers up to 500mA. This gives us two problems: not only are we limited to light-load USB devices, but once you account for a keyboard and mouse, there are no ports left for anything else.
It’s important that your USB hub has a decent power supply unit, too. The four-port hub came with what was claimed to be a 5V/900mA power brick. But on testing, it would’ve been lucky to deliver 500mA downhill with a tailwind. So again, we recommend that if you buy a hub, make sure it comes with a 5V/2A brick so that it has enough power reserves to run an external hard drive.
The distro is built on the Raspbian optimised release of Debian Wheezy. It features HFP support for the Pi’s BCM2835 CPU, along with the LXDE desktop environment and mostly programming aids to build your own apps. Our APC piLinux distro is built on the previous stable Squeeze release of Debian, but comes with the Xfce desktop environment and includes word processing (AbiWord), spreadsheet (Gnumeric), web browser (Firefox clone Iceweasel) and the Omxplayer command line video player, which handles up to 1080p H.264 video playback.
That said, the Pi is fast enough to play Quake III, play back 1080p video and handle speech recognition — not bad for a $38 computer. That it’s capable of running Linux and can be programmed with the Python language means there’s little doubt it’ll produce more ingenious and surprising ideas in the coming months.
Grab a 2GB SD card, plug it into your PC/laptop, download our APC piLinux for Raspberry Pi distro (550MB) from apcmag.com/pilinux.htm (self-extracting archive) or the official Debian Wheezy distro (440MB) from tinyurl.com/76t6ekf (.ZIP file). You’ll also need Win32DiskImager from tinyurl.com/7ll9vau. Unzip the Win32DiskImager archive and launch the .EXE file.
Once the process is completed, take the card, plug it into the
Raspberry Pi’s SD card slot, plug in the power and it should begin
booting up. Bootup time takes around 40 seconds and you’ll get to the
login prompt. For our APC piLinux distro, there are two
username/password accounts: root / apc (admin account) and apc / magazine (user account). For the official distro, it’s pi / raspberry .
Select the .IMG file of the operating system from your saved location
and select the SD card drive letter. As a warning, make sure that you
select the correct drive because all of the data on that drive will be
erased. Once you’re ready, click the ‘Write’ button and the distro will
be written to the SD card.
Once you’re logged in, type startx and the Pi will begin
launching the distro’s desktop environment. Once you see the desktop
display, you’re good to go. After this, your SD card will appear to have
just 64MB capacity in Windows due to it now having two partitions. You
can use Win32DiskImager to rewrite distro .IMG files to the card, but to
get the full capacity back, you must delete both SD card partitions in
Linux with a tool like GParted.
from http://apcmag.com/guide-to-raspberry-pi-part-2-making-the-pi-work.htm
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This tells the Pi to shut down,
This tells APC piLinux to resize the file system for the SD card’s second partition to match the partition table we just created. Again, no data changes hands — we’re just writing the changes to use the full card capacity.
Now, go and have a cuppa. If you use a 32GB card like I have, it’ll take around 10 minutes or so. But when it’s done, type
The Raspberry Pi was really designed to be an educational computer to
enable kids to learn how to program, although that doesn’t mean you
can’t have some fun with it, too. It might be a long time since this
game was winning awards, but Quake III can be played on the Pi and at
decent frame rates.
At this stage there’s no sound, although it’ll give you an idea of just what’s possible. You’ll also need an internet connection on your Pi for this one. The Quake III source code was released to open source by game developer id Software back in 2006 and the version you’ll play here is based on the demo version, so it’s all legal.
Then, launch it by typing the following:
The script is a modified version created by mitchtech.net, which will grab all of the necessary Quake III game engine and demo .PAK files, unzip them and move them into the right folders. Once you get the ‘Done’ message, launch Quake III by typing:
After a flurry of text on the Terminal screen, it should soon go blank, flash the id Software splash screen and come up asking for a CD key. Just press the Esc key and it’ll quickly drop back to the Quake III menu screen. Quake III operates via keyboard and mouse (arrow keys for direction, mouse to aim and fire) and you can adjust all aspects of the game — from controls through to game resolution — from the main menu.
Once it’s installed, go to the main menu, select ‘Games’, choose ‘AirStrike’ and the game should launch. Like Quake III, it’s more than fast enough on the Raspberry Pi and is only a 2.7MB download.
from http://apcmag.com/guide-to-raspberry-pi-part-4-gaming-on-a-raspberry-pi.htm
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To younger generations, today’s computing world began with the
rise of the internet in the mid-’90s. In reality, home computing dates
back to the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Built on the back of classic
machines like the Commodore 64 and VIC-20, the Tandy TRS80 and the
Sinclair ZX81, these small steps into the world of computing became
surprisingly affordable. As newer, more sophisticated computers appeared
on the market, older models were discounted, sowing in buyers the first
seeds of doubts about ‘future proofing’. No- one really cared because
these discounted models were cheap. Dirt cheap. I personally remember
seeing Commodore Plus/4 and Texas Instruments TI99/4A computers being
sold by electronics stores in Australia during that time for just $99.
But it wasn’t long before the bean counters at Microsoft, IBM and Intel
spoilt our fun, took the whole thing far too seriously and wanted to do
serious work, of all the nerve! In a twinkling, hobby computers all
but disappeared as ‘IBM-compatible’ became the buzzwords.
Over the last few years, there’s been a slow burn return to those frontier days. And it’s largely thanks to the internet and sites like Make, MakeUseOf and countless others. That slow build has turned into a stampede over the last six months, as low-cost ARM processors and Linux have grown into an irresistible combination. In fact, the next six months look set to be a full-on revolution.
Then word began to filter out late in 2011 that a UK group was about to stun the world with a tiny computer, featuring an HDMI output, USB and Linux. The price? An astonishing $38. A few people questioned whether a computer at that price could be of any use, but the developers needn’t have worried — since its release in March this year, worldwide demand for the Raspberry Pi has been so great that it’s almost permanently on back order. Today, they’re making 4,000 a day just to keep up.
The Raspberry Pi, available from www.element14.com for $38 plus shipping.
To be fair, the Raspberry Pi wasn’t the first single-board computer (SBC) on the market. Low-cost microcontrollers from Atmel and PIC have been around since the mid-1990s, but they’ve generally been single-task systems, used to create everything from car performance kits to stereo FM transmitters. The Pi was the first to show that ARM processors were now so cheap — yet powerful enough — to turn into low-cost full-function computers.
Since the release of the Pi, hardware developers have been launching themselves onto the bandwagon and there are now over 40 SBCs on the market. Most importantly, a dozen or so of them are crashing through the $100 barrier.
Look at any budget tablet selling for under $150 on eBay at the moment and it’s almost guaranteed to be running an Allwinner A10 ARM chip. Rumours are this Chinese-developed CPU costs just $7 in quantity yet its single core clocks at up to 1.5GHz (much higher than the competition), features accelerated H.264 video and a 400MHz GPU for accelerated graphics. Throw in HDMI, Ethernet and USB, and you’ve got a powerhouse chip for the cost of a couple of coffees.
The Raspberry Pi itself features Broadcom’s 700MHz BCM2835 media applications processor. Not much is known about its price, but it’s rumoured to be costing the R-Pi Foundation around $11. For your money, the chip delivers full 1080p H.264 acceleration and HDMI output. It’s even designed to handle digital camera image sensors up to 20MP and a new 5MP camera module for the Pi has just been announced to sell for around $25.
SBCs like the Raspberry Pi are usually powered by USB, but require significantly more power if you start throwing in keyboards, mice and portable hard drives. Ideally, they need a 5V/2A power supply to keep them ticking over. You can pick these up from eBay for under $5 and most electronics retailers for under $20.
The block diagram of the Pi (below) shows just what the developers have managed to squeeze into this tiny system. The circuit board is multilayered like standard motherboards and in the case of the Pi, also comes with what’s called a General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) bus to allow you to interact with the outside world, such as turning lights on and off, operating solenoids and other external electronics.
Block diagram of the Raspberry Pi circuit board.
The most notable models are the Rikomagic MK802, a tiny Allwinner A10-powered computer little larger than a USB flash drive selling for around $75 on eBay; and the VIA APC.
However, the real action is in what are called Android TV
boxes. They masquerade as digital media players and there are plenty of
them selling online for under US$100, yet they have everything needed to
turn them into low-cost computers. In fact, there’s a growing community
dedicated to hacking Allwinner A10-based TV boxes and running
custom-built Linux distros on them. And don’t kid yourself that they
can’t do it either — with up to 1.5GHz clock speed, the Allwinner A10 is
gaining a reputation as a surprise packet that outclasses the Raspberry
Pi.
The model we saw as we went to press was the new TV Cloud Stick, which offers a 1GHz Telechips TCC8925 ARMv7 processor, Android 4.0 operating system, HDMI output and twin USB ports, all in a USB stick format for just $60 on eBay.
During the writing of this feature, we found new SBCs being launched almost weekly, so while tablets and smartphones are changing the face of consumer computing, the same components are now becoming available for hobbyists in working SBCs at much cheaper prices. Below are some of the sub-$100 SBCs available.
Personally, I’m just waiting for someone to build a Raspberry Pi inside a full-sized keyboard. Now that really would take us back to the Commodore 64…
from http://apcmag.com/the-ultra-cheap-computer-revolution.htm
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There are a small number of Linux releases available for the Pi, but they’re either function-specific like raspbmc or they’re focused in a particular direction, like the education/programming focus of the new official Debian Wheezy release. Don’t get us wrong — the official release with its HFP support for the Pi’s BCM2835 CPU is fantastic. However, it uses the LXDE desktop environment and as a long-time fan of Xfce, I personally wanted to see if we could get something more rounded up and running. APC piLinux for Raspberry Pi is the result.
First boot
As with most distros, the first time you boot up and typestartx will be the slowest, as it sets itself up on the SD card. If you haven’t yet, make sure you follow the instructions in ‘Resizing your SD card’ to get full value from your card’s storage.We’ve given the Xfce4 desktop a simple APC blue background image and customised the taskbar to include our own APC ‘Start’ button called ‘Applications’. We’ve also included a CPU monitor. This will be important because let’s face it, 700MHz isn’t a lot of clock speed to play with and some apps like web browsing will smack into the CPU performance end stops. The CPU monitor gives you a quick visual on the CPU load — if it’s a solid blue block, ease up a bit on what you’re doing and wait for the CPU to calm down again before doing the next task.
The four blocks on the taskbar will allow you to run four different desktops. That means instead of cluttering all of your open apps onto one desktop, you can move them across four and spread out, a bit like having four monitors, but without using up all that desk space.
Launching apps
You’ll find the full list of apps available in the ‘Applications’ menu. If you’re coming from a Windows background, think of this as the old Windows ‘Start’ orb. You can do everything from here, including making changes to Xfce, such as changing the background image or other features of the desktop environment.Adding external storage
Adding more storage to the Pi is pretty simple. If you have a USB flash drive or external hard drive, just plug it into an available port on your powered USB hub. APC piLinux will automatically find it, mount it and launch the Thunar file manager to give a look inside. Not only that, you should also get a desktop icon for your new drive. So far, we’ve had numerous flash drives and USB hard drives plugged in and working perfectly. Just be aware that some USB powered hubs may give the Pi problems and make sure your hub’s power brick has the juice to run your peripherals. Also remember to unmount your drives before removing them; in Thunar, right-click the drive in the list on the left and select ‘Unmount Volume’ from the context menu that appears. This just ensures that any delayed writes to the drive are performed before you remove it so you don’t lose any data.If you’ve played with any of the UserOS Linux distros I built for PC User, you should find this one pretty similar to use. Even if you haven’t, if you can use Windows, you should be able to drive this one.
Internet access
Getting internet access should be as simple as plugging in your Ethernet cable before you boot up. APC piLinux has DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) connectivity, so it will automatically interact with your network router, grab itself an available IP address and be ready to go. However, just be aware that this is probably the toughest thing you’ll get the Pi to do because it’s so CPU-intensive. It’s even more intensive than H.264 video decoding because the CPU can offload that to its GPU to handle, whereas everything web-based has to be done by the CPU itself.Again, the first time you launch Iceweasel will be the slowest and it will speed up a little after that.
Try it out
ARM processors are quickly becoming a viable alternative to traditional x86 processors. The Raspberry Pi won’t have the legs to outpace an Intel Core i5 chip, but to get a whole computer for $38 isn’t bad going. APC piLinux aims to turn your Pi into a general-purpose computer so if you get hold of one, why not give it a spin?CPU/GPU memory allocation
The Broadcom BCM2835 CPU is unusual because it comes with a fixed 256MB cache of RAM that you can manually allocate on bootup between the CPU and GPU.Load the SD card with APC piLinux on it into your Windows computer with Windows Explorer and you’ll see the 64MB partition. Inside, you’ll see four ‘start.elf’ files. These are the bootloaders that control that memory allocation when the Pi boots up each time.
We’ve set the default split to 192/64MB (CPU/GPU) because the GPU requires 64MB of memory for the video buffer in order to play back 1080p video. If you’re not interested in video, you can gain a little extra speed by selecting a 224/32MB CPU/GPU split. To do that, delete ‘start.elf’, make a copy of ‘arm224_start.elf’ and rename it ‘start.elf’. When you’re done, plug the card back into your Pi, boot up and it’ll tell you the changed RAM split.
APC piLinux for Raspberry Pi: App list
Here’s a quick rundown of the apps built into APC piLinux.You also get access to Debian Squeeze’s 25,000+ app repository through the Terminal-based apt app. Just plug the Pi into your home network and you’re away.
- File manager — Thunar
- Word processor — AbiWord
- Spreadsheet — Gnumeric
- Web browser — Iceweasel
- Media player — Omxplayer
- Disk Editor — GParted
- Image viewer — Ristretto
- BitTorrent client — Transmission
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It’s the ultra-cheap computer that’s turning heads. Darren Yates introduces you to the Raspberry Pi, the single-board computer that’s cheaper than taking the kids to the movies.
Imagine a circuit board the size of a
compact Android phone, surrounded by sockets with a tiny processor in
the middle and you’ve pretty much got the Raspberry Pi single-board
computer (SBC). Designed in the UK and available in Australia through Element14,
the Raspberry Pi gives you a fully functioning computer for $38 plus
shipping. That means that your overall outlay wouldn’t be much more than
$50.
Connectivity
The board itself features a wide array of connection options including composite video out and HDMI output, along with 3.5mm stereo analogue audio, two USB Type-A/host ports plus a microUSB port for power and built-in 10/100 Ethernet socket.There’s no storage on board, but you can supply up to 64GB through the SecureDigital card slot on the underside of the board, which also supplies the bootup mechanism and the operating system you run.
The processor
The brains behind the Pi is Broadcom’s
BCM2835 SoC, a 700MHz single-core ARMv6 media applications processor
with 256MB of onboard RAM and accelerated H.264 decoding up to 1080p
(1,920 x 1,080-pixel) resolution at 30fps. Because it uses the
superseded ARMv6 architecture, though, it doesn’t run Android, nor will
it run any Ubuntu-based Linux distro. However, Ubuntu’s parent
distribution, Debian, does support ARMv6 and you’ll find one or two
options available (including our very own APC piLinux for Raspberry Pi).
Raspberry Pi SBC
The drawback at the moment is that although the BCM2835 has a
hardware floating-point (HFP) processing engine, most available distros
use software-based floating-point processing, which is considerably
slower. Raspberry Pi made a decent move forward with the HFP release of a
new official Debian Wheezy distro specifically built for the Pi.
Reports are that HFP can increase performance by as much as 60% or more.Importantly, though, you don’t need ARMv6/HFP to play back 1080p H.264 video — while you do need to keep the overall video bit rate down to around 3.5Mbps, the Pi will do the job on the standard ARMv6 Debian release.
Booting up the Pi
We’ll look more at this in a moment, but the Pi requires a special two-partition boot disk in order to launch: a small 64MB FAT32 boot partition and a secondary extended (Ext4) formatted partition with the operating system proper. Windows doesn’t support multi-partition creation on SD cards or flash drives, but Pi-compatible distros come as an .IMG file that’s basically a multi-partitioned ISO image, which you can write to an SD card using a free Windows utility.You can use any SD card 2GB or larger, although we’d recommend an 8GB card (they’re cheap enough) and one that’s at least Class 6 in speed.
Starting the Pi is pretty simple — there’s no power button or reset button. You simply add power to the microUSB port to power up and remove it to power off or reset.
Imagination
If you’re looking for a complete computer system with nothing to do, it might disappoint you. However, there are some incredible projects being built around the Pi, from gaming consoles to voice recognition — the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
The Raspberry Pi is a fully functioning computer the size of a compact Android Phone
from http://apcmag.com/guide-to-raspberry-pi-intro.htm
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Guide to Raspberry Pi (Part 2) - Making the Pi work
Given the Raspberry Pi gives you nothing
more than a circuit board, you’ll need to supply a few extras of your
own in order to turn it into a fully functional computer. While the Pi
supports a composite video output, meaning you could use almost any
video display, the simplest option is an HDMI-capable monitor. The Pi’s
HDMI port is a full-sized one, so any basic HDMI male-to-male cable will
do the job.
Power supply
However, the most critical element is the power supply. On its own, the Pi needs a minimum 5V/700mA DC power feed to get it up and running. However, in practice, you need at least a 5V/1A (1,000mA) supply. We managed to power the Pi using an HTC smartphone 5V/1A adapter. The fact that the Pi also uses a standard microUSB port to supply the power meant we used the HTC data/power cable, too (as we said, the Pi comes as a board only). While this worked for us, we can’t guarantee every 5V/1A adapter will work. As you’ll read in a moment, not all USB-ready power adapters are worth the power they claim to deliver.The Pi has two USB 2.0 ports, although they’re currently limited to 140mA each, whereas the standard USB 2.0 port usually delivers up to 500mA. This gives us two problems: not only are we limited to light-load USB devices, but once you account for a keyboard and mouse, there are no ports left for anything else.
The Pi needs a minimum 5V/700mA DC power feed to work.
Powered USB hub
This is where choosing the right powered USB hub is pretty important. Unfortunately, things are a little tricky here, too. We picked up a low-cost seven-port powered hub from the local computer store for just under $10, but we had real trouble getting it working on the Pi. Basically, as soon as we plugged a third device into the USB chain, the Ethernet port would drop its bundle. As the Ethernet runs over the USB chain as well, we think there might be high/low speed issues yet to be resolved when using some USB hubs. In the end, we bought a second four-port powered hub and it worked perfectly.It’s important that your USB hub has a decent power supply unit, too. The four-port hub came with what was claimed to be a 5V/900mA power brick. But on testing, it would’ve been lucky to deliver 500mA downhill with a tailwind. So again, we recommend that if you buy a hub, make sure it comes with a 5V/2A brick so that it has enough power reserves to run an external hard drive.
Choosing the right powered USB is important to ensure it works with the Pi.
SD card boot disk
The other thing you’ll need is the SD card boot disk. You can buy a 2GB SD card with the basic Debian Squeeze Linux distro preloaded from Pi retailers, but that’s hardly the way to do it, especially when you can do it yourself. All you need is the freeware Win32DiskImager utility and a Pi-ready distro. You can see how it’s done in the step-by-step guide opposite. For now, the two simplest distros to install are the brand-new official Debian Wheezy distro you can download from the Raspberry Pi web site at tinyurl.com/76t6ekf, or our own APC piLinux for Raspberry Pi distro available from apcmag.com/pilinux.htm.The distro is built on the Raspbian optimised release of Debian Wheezy. It features HFP support for the Pi’s BCM2835 CPU, along with the LXDE desktop environment and mostly programming aids to build your own apps. Our APC piLinux distro is built on the previous stable Squeeze release of Debian, but comes with the Xfce desktop environment and includes word processing (AbiWord), spreadsheet (Gnumeric), web browser (Firefox clone Iceweasel) and the Omxplayer command line video player, which handles up to 1080p H.264 video playback.
Casework
While the Raspberry Pi team went for the most compact design it could, there’s nothing in the way of mounting holes on the board, so you’ll have to be a bit inventive about installing your Pi into a case. Unless you happen to have a 3D printer lying around, the simplest way is actually to make one out of LEGO. In fact, you can buy purpose-built LEGO cases from thedailybrick.co.uk for around $16 or if you’ve got kids, follow the guide at www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1354 and use your own LEGO pieces.
A case for the Pi can easily be created using LEGO pieces.
Performance
If you’re expecting to replace your PC with one of these, don’t hold your breath. According to the Raspberry Pi team, they equate the 700MHz Broadcom BCM2835’s processing performance to that of a 300MHz Pentium II — and that’s a pretty fair call based on our experience.That said, the Pi is fast enough to play Quake III, play back 1080p video and handle speech recognition — not bad for a $38 computer. That it’s capable of running Linux and can be programmed with the Python language means there’s little doubt it’ll produce more ingenious and surprising ideas in the coming months.
Building your Raspberry Pi SD card boot disk
Step 1: Download the image file
Grab a 2GB SD card, plug it into your PC/laptop, download our APC piLinux for Raspberry Pi distro (550MB) from apcmag.com/pilinux.htm (self-extracting archive) or the official Debian Wheezy distro (440MB) from tinyurl.com/76t6ekf (.ZIP file). You’ll also need Win32DiskImager from tinyurl.com/7ll9vau. Unzip the Win32DiskImager archive and launch the .EXE file.Step 2 : Hook it up to the pi
Once the process is completed, take the card, plug it into the
Raspberry Pi’s SD card slot, plug in the power and it should begin
booting up. Bootup time takes around 40 seconds and you’ll get to the
login prompt. For our APC piLinux distro, there are two
username/password accounts: root / apc (admin account) and apc / magazine (user account). For the official distro, it’s pi / raspberry .Step 3 : Copy the image to your sd card
Select the .IMG file of the operating system from your saved location
and select the SD card drive letter. As a warning, make sure that you
select the correct drive because all of the data on that drive will be
erased. Once you’re ready, click the ‘Write’ button and the distro will
be written to the SD card.Step 4 : Log in & launch it
Once you’re logged in, type startx and the Pi will begin
launching the distro’s desktop environment. Once you see the desktop
display, you’re good to go. After this, your SD card will appear to have
just 64MB capacity in Windows due to it now having two partitions. You
can use Win32DiskImager to rewrite distro .IMG files to the card, but to
get the full capacity back, you must delete both SD card partitions in
Linux with a tool like GParted.from http://apcmag.com/guide-to-raspberry-pi-part-2-making-the-pi-work.htm
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Guide to Raspberry Pi (Part 3) - Resizing your sd card
this article shows you how to manually change your Raspberry Pi Linux distro to use your SD card’s full capacity.
Building your Raspberry Pi SD card boot disk
Installing a Raspberry Pi distro .IMG file onto an SD card with just Windows is convenient, but it leaves us with a problem: the SD card capacity will become whatever the size the .IMG file is set to. For example, our APC Linux distro has the compulsory 64MB FAT32 partition and an Ext4 partition for the OS set to 1.8GB, regardless of the SD card size you use. It’s just a by-product of image-based Pi distros, but one you can fix on the Raspberry Pi itself. Here’s how.Step 1: Boot up your Raspberry Pi
Assuming you’ve installed APC piLinux onto an SD card, remove any other drives from the Pi, plug in the SD card and boot up. Once you get to the user login point, typeroot as the username and apc as the password, but don’t run startx .Step 2: Delete the partition table
Don’t worry — this step doesn’t delete the operating system. We’re just rejigging the partition table to tell the OS to use the full capacity of the card. So, type: fdisk –cu /dev/mmcblk0 Here,d <enter>2 <enter>n <enter>p <enter>2 <enter><enter><enter>W <enter>
d is the delete command, 2 means delete the partition 2 table, n says that we’re about to create something, p means create a new partition and 2
is a new partition table for partition 2. By default, fdisk should then
give us the correct start block for the new table, so we can just press
Enter. It should also give us the default option to use the entire card
capacity, so press Enter again. Finally, w tells fdisk to write the partition table out and you should be back to the Terminal prompt.
Step 3: reboot & resize
You’ll have to reboot the Pi and you do that by typing:shutdown -r now <enter> This tells the Pi to shut down,
-r means we want to reboot and now means do it now. When you get back to the login screen, log in as before, but don’t startx . Instead, type:resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2 <enter>This tells APC piLinux to resize the file system for the SD card’s second partition to match the partition table we just created. Again, no data changes hands — we’re just writing the changes to use the full card capacity.
Now, go and have a cuppa. If you use a 32GB card like I have, it’ll take around 10 minutes or so. But when it’s done, type
startx
and when you’ve booted up into the desktop, launch Thunar file manager
(‘Applications > Accessories > Thunar’) and you should see the
free space at the bottom of the window much nearer the card capacity. If
so, you’re done.
from http://apcmag.com/guide-to-raspberry-pi-part-3-resizing-your-sd-card.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guide to Raspberry Pi (Part 4) - Gaming on a Raspberry PI
The Raspberry Pi has a GPU and it’s up for Quake III. Darren Yates shows you how to run this classic game.
The Raspberry Pi was really designed to be an educational computer to
enable kids to learn how to program, although that doesn’t mean you
can’t have some fun with it, too. It might be a long time since this
game was winning awards, but Quake III can be played on the Pi and at
decent frame rates. At this stage there’s no sound, although it’ll give you an idea of just what’s possible. You’ll also need an internet connection on your Pi for this one. The Quake III source code was released to open source by game developer id Software back in 2006 and the version you’ll play here is based on the demo version, so it’s all legal.
STEP 1: Grab the Debian distribution from Raspberry Pi
We haven’t got Quake III working on APC piLinux yet, so you’ll need to download the June 19 Debian distro from Raspberry Pi at tinyurl.com/c4vzenr. Install this to your 2GB SD card using the same method we used for installing piLinux. When you’re done, load the SD card into your Raspberry Pi and boot up. To log in, the username ispi and the password is raspberry . Don’t launch startx yet.STEP 2: Download our Quake III installer
The next step is to grab our Quake III installer script. To do that, type the following at the command prompt:wget http://dl.techlife.net/apps/ quake3install.shThen, launch it by typing the following:
bash ./quake3install.sh The script is a modified version created by mitchtech.net, which will grab all of the necessary Quake III game engine and demo .PAK files, unzip them and move them into the right folders. Once you get the ‘Done’ message, launch Quake III by typing:
cd quake3 && ./start.shAfter a flurry of text on the Terminal screen, it should soon go blank, flash the id Software splash screen and come up asking for a CD key. Just press the Esc key and it’ll quickly drop back to the Quake III menu screen. Quake III operates via keyboard and mouse (arrow keys for direction, mouse to aim and fire) and you can adjust all aspects of the game — from controls through to game resolution — from the main menu.
Other options
It’s early days for the Raspberry Pi, but already, one genius has worked out how to run SNES games on the Pi and even hack the SNES game controller to run via the Pi’s GPIO bus. So don’t be surprised to see more of these hacks appear in the coming months.Airstrike
Quake III probably isn’t the best option if you have littlies running around, so an annoyingly addictive G-rated game is AirStrike. It’s easy to get and works in the Quake III Debian distro we’ve used here. Just launch Terminal from the Applications menu and type:sudo apt-get install airstrike Once it’s installed, go to the main menu, select ‘Games’, choose ‘AirStrike’ and the game should launch. Like Quake III, it’s more than fast enough on the Raspberry Pi and is only a 2.7MB download.
from http://apcmag.com/guide-to-raspberry-pi-part-4-gaming-on-a-raspberry-pi.htm
---------------------------------------------------------
how sub-$100 single-board computers and tablets are changing the face of computing.
Over the last few years, there’s been a slow burn return to those frontier days. And it’s largely thanks to the internet and sites like Make, MakeUseOf and countless others. That slow build has turned into a stampede over the last six months, as low-cost ARM processors and Linux have grown into an irresistible combination. In fact, the next six months look set to be a full-on revolution.
Single-board computers
The return of low-cost computing scored its first goal in 2006 when the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project gained the support of the United Nations to build a low-cost laptop for kids in the developing world that could be built for under $100. Although it’s never quite hit that magic price point, further development of the ARM processor architecture and Linux has seen prices continue to fall.Then word began to filter out late in 2011 that a UK group was about to stun the world with a tiny computer, featuring an HDMI output, USB and Linux. The price? An astonishing $38. A few people questioned whether a computer at that price could be of any use, but the developers needn’t have worried — since its release in March this year, worldwide demand for the Raspberry Pi has been so great that it’s almost permanently on back order. Today, they’re making 4,000 a day just to keep up.
The Raspberry Pi, available from www.element14.com for $38 plus shipping.
To be fair, the Raspberry Pi wasn’t the first single-board computer (SBC) on the market. Low-cost microcontrollers from Atmel and PIC have been around since the mid-1990s, but they’ve generally been single-task systems, used to create everything from car performance kits to stereo FM transmitters. The Pi was the first to show that ARM processors were now so cheap — yet powerful enough — to turn into low-cost full-function computers.
Since the release of the Pi, hardware developers have been launching themselves onto the bandwagon and there are now over 40 SBCs on the market. Most importantly, a dozen or so of them are crashing through the $100 barrier.
Under the bonnet
What makes these SBCs possible is the growing sophistication of ‘system on a chip’ (SoC) processors. These low-cost CPUs, based on the ever-popular ARM architecture, contain everything from memory controllers, USB ports and GPU all on the one piece of silicon. And they’re now becoming deliciously cheap. While popular chips from the likes of Nvidia, Samsung and Qualcomm drive almost every smartphone and tablet in existence, lesser-known, low-cost, high-performance parts are arriving from China.Look at any budget tablet selling for under $150 on eBay at the moment and it’s almost guaranteed to be running an Allwinner A10 ARM chip. Rumours are this Chinese-developed CPU costs just $7 in quantity yet its single core clocks at up to 1.5GHz (much higher than the competition), features accelerated H.264 video and a 400MHz GPU for accelerated graphics. Throw in HDMI, Ethernet and USB, and you’ve got a powerhouse chip for the cost of a couple of coffees.
The Raspberry Pi itself features Broadcom’s 700MHz BCM2835 media applications processor. Not much is known about its price, but it’s rumoured to be costing the R-Pi Foundation around $11. For your money, the chip delivers full 1080p H.264 acceleration and HDMI output. It’s even designed to handle digital camera image sensors up to 20MP and a new 5MP camera module for the Pi has just been announced to sell for around $25.
SBCs like the Raspberry Pi are usually powered by USB, but require significantly more power if you start throwing in keyboards, mice and portable hard drives. Ideally, they need a 5V/2A power supply to keep them ticking over. You can pick these up from eBay for under $5 and most electronics retailers for under $20.
The block diagram of the Pi (below) shows just what the developers have managed to squeeze into this tiny system. The circuit board is multilayered like standard motherboards and in the case of the Pi, also comes with what’s called a General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) bus to allow you to interact with the outside world, such as turning lights on and off, operating solenoids and other external electronics.
Block diagram of the Raspberry Pi circuit board.
What’s available?
As we said, the Raspberry Pi is really just the battering ram for this ultra-cheap computing juggernaut. We managed to pick up three, including the Raspberry Pi, for this feature, but there’s a flood of other models either just about to hit the market or in various stages of design.The most notable models are the Rikomagic MK802, a tiny Allwinner A10-powered computer little larger than a USB flash drive selling for around $75 on eBay; and the VIA APC.
The model we saw as we went to press was the new TV Cloud Stick, which offers a 1GHz Telechips TCC8925 ARMv7 processor, Android 4.0 operating system, HDMI output and twin USB ports, all in a USB stick format for just $60 on eBay.
What’s coming?
No doubt some will dismiss SBCs as just toys, but we’re getting way past that level. Korean maker HardKernel sells the ODROID-X, an open-source Android development platform, for US$129. For that price, you get a Raspberry Pi-like SBC with — wait for it — a 1.4GHz quad-core Samsung Exynos 4412 ARM processor, six USB 2.0 ports, microHDMI output and Android 4.0.4 operating system. Plug in a keyboard, mouse and HDMI monitor, load up the operating system via SD card and you’re away. You can even install Google Play or Ubuntu 12.04 Linux. It might be a bit over the $100 mark, but the level of hardware here is just extraordinary — you’re talking about the very same CPU that’s inside Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone. We’re definitely a long way from Commodore 64 performance here.During the writing of this feature, we found new SBCs being launched almost weekly, so while tablets and smartphones are changing the face of consumer computing, the same components are now becoming available for hobbyists in working SBCs at much cheaper prices. Below are some of the sub-$100 SBCs available.
Model
|
Price
|
Processor
|
|---|---|---|
CX-01
|
$52
|
1GHz Telechips TCC8923 (ARMv7) |
Gooseberry board
|
$99
|
1GHz Allwinner A10 |
GV-2C
|
$65
|
1GHz InfoTMIC iMAPx210 |
Mele A1000
|
$99
|
1GHz Allwinner A10 |
Mele A2000
|
$99
|
1GHz Allwinner A10 |
Oval Elephant K-A10
|
$72
|
1GHz Allwinner A10 |
Pineriver MiniX
|
$85
|
1GHz Allwinner A10 |
Raspberry Pi Model B
|
$38
|
700MHz Broadcom BCM2835 |
Rikomagic MK802
|
$76
|
1GHz Allwinner A10 |
Smallart UHOST
|
$72
|
1GHz Allwinner A10 |
TV Cloud Stick
|
$60
|
1GHz Telechips TCC8925 (ARMv7) |
VIA APC
|
$49
|
800MHz VIA Wondermedia 8750 |
Serious performance
Don’t think the big end of town hasn’t noticed. SoCs are the new kid on the block in corporate servers, yet they’re gaining fans, based on their ability to deliver considerably more performance than traditional server solutions per unit of electrical power. Calxeda has developed ARM server solutions around its EnergyCore ARM SoC that are now sold by HP. Dell is using Marvell’s Armada XP 78460 SoC inside its new Copper ARM microservers and to show off how power-miserly SoCs can be, Red Hat recently demoed an ARM-based server powered by a bicycle.The future
However, it’s the hobbyist computer reborn out of ARM processors and Linux/Android operating systems that are clearly far more fun. The team behind the Raspberry Pi had the goal to make a low-cost computer that kids could afford, have fun with and learn how to program. In reality, they’ve spawned a new industry. Sure, the Pi and others like it aren’t going to replace your PC any time soon (although the ODROID-X is getting damn close), but you can be certain they’ll only improve over time as dual and quad-core ARM chips drop down in price. Right now, the Raspberry Pi can browse the web, handle Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and play 1080p H.264 video.Personally, I’m just waiting for someone to build a Raspberry Pi inside a full-sized keyboard. Now that really would take us back to the Commodore 64…
from http://apcmag.com/the-ultra-cheap-computer-revolution.htm
--------------------
树莓派网站
- 树莓派官方网站：https://www.raspberrypi.org/
- Pin Numbering – Raspberry Pi：http://pi4j.com/
- 树莓派Wiki http://elinux.org/RPi_Low-level_peripherals
--------------
raspberry pi(树莓派）相关记录
###配件 电源只要满足700mA/5V都可以，但最好配置>1.5A/5V的电源适配器，特别如果要挂载移动硬盘
USB的键盘鼠标，如果是PS/2接口的，需要一个转接器转化成USB
一根HDMI线
一张至少4G/class4的SD卡，注意有些SD卡不兼容
一根microUSB线做电源线
USB的键盘鼠标，如果是PS/2接口的，需要一个转接器转化成USB
一根HDMI线
一张至少4G/class4的SD卡，注意有些SD卡不兼容
一根microUSB线做电源线
###树莓派版本选择 官方推荐raspbian系统，这个系统默认启动进入字符终端模式，可以用apt-get安装XBMC应用，但是有些不稳定，没有其他三个XBMC专门版本稳定，其次首次运行XBMC起来要几十秒。
raspbmc、xbian、OpenELEC三个都是XBMC专用版本。
如果你的树莓派用来做服务器的话，推荐使用raspbian系统，raspbian有几乎和debian一样多的软件包，如lighttpd、mysql、php、apache等，正常开机不启动XBMC，节省资源。
如果你有用XBMC播放视频需求的话，推荐使用raspbmc，本身就是为XBMC优化，其次可以用apt-get安装软件，比如lighttpd、nodejs、polipo。XBMC空闲不播放时占用10%+的CPU资源，树莓派用HDMI连接到电视，要看视频打开电视就是XBMC界面。
raspbmc、xbian、OpenELEC三个都是XBMC专用版本。
如果你的树莓派用来做服务器的话，推荐使用raspbian系统，raspbian有几乎和debian一样多的软件包，如lighttpd、mysql、php、apache等，正常开机不启动XBMC，节省资源。
如果你有用XBMC播放视频需求的话，推荐使用raspbmc，本身就是为XBMC优化，其次可以用apt-get安装软件，比如lighttpd、nodejs、polipo。XBMC空闲不播放时占用10%+的CPU资源，树莓派用HDMI连接到电视，要看视频打开电视就是XBMC界面。
###代理服务器 代理服务器的原理点击这里
我选择的版本是raspbmc，安装了polipo、nodejs版的shadowsocks和cow。
使用cow搭建一个http代理，cow可以设置上级代理是shadowsocks的socks5代理，cow可以自动判断网站是直接连接还是通过socks5代理。polipo主要是做代理备份，当cow工作不正常时才临时使用。
我选择的版本是raspbmc，安装了polipo、nodejs版的shadowsocks和cow。
使用cow搭建一个http代理，cow可以设置上级代理是shadowsocks的socks5代理，cow可以自动判断网站是直接连接还是通过socks5代理。polipo主要是做代理备份，当cow工作不正常时才临时使用。
###XBMC视频播放 raspbmc本身就是个XBMC优化版本，支持播放windows网络共享里的视频。
安卓手机可以安装个XBMC remote应用来控制树莓派上的XBMC
可以配置NFS，这样iPad上的xbmc可以远程播放树莓派连接的移动电源里的视频。iPad上的xbmc也可以通过sabma连接，但是总是连接超时，所以我改用NFS来连接。
安卓手机可以安装个XBMC remote应用来控制树莓派上的XBMC
可以配置NFS，这样iPad上的xbmc可以远程播放树莓派连接的移动电源里的视频。iPad上的xbmc也可以通过sabma连接，但是总是连接超时，所以我改用NFS来连接。
###挂载3.5寸移动硬盘 因为3.5寸移动硬盘已经外接供电，这样不需要树莓派的USB供电，USB只是作为普通的数据端口。
测试raspbian和raspbmc都可以正常挂接。驱动要安装ntfs-3g，然后通过mount挂载，具体步骤可以参考这里raspbmc Automount an NTFS USB HDD。
最新版的raspbmc连mount都不用，插入移动硬盘后系统自动挂载，挂载在/media/[磁盘名]，磁盘名和移动硬盘挂接windows下的盘符卷标一样的。windows上可以将网络共享映射为本地磁盘，这样下载和使用都像本地磁盘没什么区别。
测试raspbian和raspbmc都可以正常挂接。驱动要安装ntfs-3g，然后通过mount挂载，具体步骤可以参考这里raspbmc Automount an NTFS USB HDD。
最新版的raspbmc连mount都不用，插入移动硬盘后系统自动挂载，挂载在/media/[磁盘名]，磁盘名和移动硬盘挂接windows下的盘符卷标一样的。windows上可以将网络共享映射为本地磁盘，这样下载和使用都像本地磁盘没什么区别。
警告：2.5寸的移动硬盘需要USB供电我没有尝试过。
###网站服务器 lighttpd用于搭建一个简单的web server，这样可以使用pac文件。
raspbmc本身带了ftp、samba、SSH服务，并且默认是打开的，可以在XBMC界面：程序-raspbmc settings里打开关闭。
samba服务默认将/home/pi和/media两个目录共享，windows可以通过网上邻居访问读写,windows上可以将连接在树莓派的移动硬盘映射为一个盘符，用迅雷下载视频文件，然后在树莓派上的xbmc直接播放。
raspbmc本身带了ftp、samba、SSH服务，并且默认是打开的，可以在XBMC界面：程序-raspbmc settings里打开关闭。
samba服务默认将/home/pi和/media两个目录共享，windows可以通过网上邻居访问读写,windows上可以将连接在树莓派的移动硬盘映射为一个盘符，用迅雷下载视频文件，然后在树莓派上的xbmc直接播放。
---------------------
Raspberry Pi Imager
树莓派官方出的一款系统烧录工具，可以直接下载并写入系统。
| 文件名 | 文件类型 | 提交时间 | 下载（7） |
| imager_1.7.3 | exe | 2023-01-04 | 极速下载 |
