Raspberry Pi

[Peter Pan]

Thanks Cloudhopper - I'll have a go tonight when I get home. Linux for Dummies has also turned up from Amazon too!

I'm trying to get the USB wireless network dongle to work (it has Linux drivers) and then mount a hard disk so I can put OpenOffice on it plus some other stuff I want to play with. It's good fun tho and definitely think the Pi will be brilliant in education.

[cloudhopper]

Thanks Cloudhopper - I'll have a go tonight when I get home. Linux for Dummies has also turned up from Amazon too!

I'm trying to get the USB wireless network dongle to work (it has Linux drivers) and then mount a hard disk so I can put OpenOffice on it plus some other stuff I want to play with. It's good fun tho and definitely think the Pi will be brilliant in education.

Sounds like fun. When I first started I broke lots of things when experimenting and I remember one real mistake I made with either fstab or a symlink that completely broke my old pc until a friend fixed it. If you're new to all of this then I'd highly recommend looking at some of the linux HOWTOs, which are possibly a little oldskool now but will explain some of the concepts and config files.

Your wireless dongle may require some experimentation with drivers to get it working - what type is it?

In terms of experimentation I'd almost be inclined to suggest that you save openoffice for an old laptop which you could install a a distribution such as ubuntu on and use the Pi for experimentation. For example, you could start by playing with networking, setting up ftp, apache etc and go from there. I've not yet got a Pi but have an old NSLU2 running openwrt and am planning to play around with a weather station. python and twitter to tweet the weather (a bit sad but fun), and to run some amateur radio stuff. I think I might get a Pi for stage 2 of experimentation because I have some ideas for remotely controlling hardware once I move house.

On the subject of the Pi, how long did it take to arrive?

What are other people doing with their Pi's?

[leiafee]

Mine took about five weeks from getting to the front of the queue, which took about three months!

Haven't done much yet other than get it up and running, but it's got Scratch on the suggested distro as one of the bundled packages and that's my favourite tool of choice for teaching programming concepts to my learners so that should be fun.

I want to get it to drive a floor robot, I've seen some good stuff done with Lego Technic, but hope with some Potching we can do cheaper but still cool...

[Peter Pan]

It has taken about 4-5 months to arrive but I feel like putting it on eBay tomorrow.

I have spent 4+ hours trying to get the recommended Edimax USB wifi dongle to work without success. There is a 13 page post on the Pi forums plus loads of stuff out there too. The 'standard' linux drivers with the dongle out of the box don't work of course, some guy (with the 13 page post) has come up with a script that doesn't work. I don't appear to have permissions to various directories despite about 2 hrs of reading stuff about Sudo and Sudo users and fiddling with a text file in the root directory about superusers.

To make sure it was working, I plugged it into a Mac and a Windows PC. Took <30 secs for it to boot up without intervention.

Disappointing and if my patience is tested I worry about young kids getting to grips with the thing but I hope I am just getting too old and too much time in the Windows / Mac world.

[cloudhopper]

ok, rather than getting frustrated with drivers for the usb i'd be inclined to dig out a good old bright yellow network cable and get it working with that first. once you've got it talking to the network i'd then spend some time having a play with sudo and permissions and copying and moving files using the command line. then take a look at config files - eg the stuff in /etc and networking and getting the hang of device naming conventions for the network and usb - eg usb0. this will help you to understand messages at boot up if you see this data (often hidden by fancy graphics these days) and dmesg - typing cat dmesg will show you kernel messages and help you troubleshoot problems. finally i'd also have a go at using apt-get in the command line which installs and updates packages.

once you've got the hang of this then you will have a better understanding of linux and should be in a better position to understand the instructions on how to install the dongle. this may take a little time but is what the pi is all about.

what is the dongle model?

feel free to drop me a pm if you need a hand.

[Ian Melville]

Disappointing and if my patience is tested I worry about young kids getting to grips with the thing but I hope I am just getting too old and too much time in the Windows / Mac world.

If it was easy you wouldn't learn anything

[Peter Pan]

Thanks CH for the encouragement - the dongle is an Edimax and seems to be one of the ones commonly used for the Pi. I would have tried fixed Ethernet but in my house the only HDMI monitor (which is Mrs Pans and she is rather precious about it!)is a long way from the hub. I'll see if our comms team have a long piece of cableI can borrow!

Ian - I agree and I went through all this pain when I first learnt DOS and had to fiddle with config.sys and autoexec.bat (remember them!).

[Ian Melville]

Ian - I agree and I went through all this pain when I first learnt DOS and had to fiddle with config.sys and autoexec.bat (remember them!).

I do indeed. Many a fun day trying to get several add-on devices not to conflict with each other

[cloudhopper]

Ian - I agree and I went through all this pain when I first learnt DOS and had to fiddle with config.sys and autoexec.bat (remember them!).

I do indeed. Many a fun day trying to get several add-on devices not to conflict with each other

Argh, not those files...I remember my first big computing mistake was to delete them!! Cue boot disk (remember those?!).

[Paul_Sengupta]

Disappointing and if my patience is tested I worry about young kids getting to grips with the thing but I hope I am just getting too old and too much time in the Windows / Mac world.

If it was easy you wouldn't learn anything

Bring back the ZX81. That was both easy and you learnt a lot. It would be very cheap these days to build.

I still think this thing should come with ZX Basic! Plug in, start programming.

[sandy771]

Argh, not those files...I remember my first big computing mistake was to delete

You dont work for RBS do you?

[JoeC]

This looks like a reasonable deal. Thinking of getting it for the kids. Any views?

[sandy771]

This looks like a reasonable deal. Thinking of getting it for the kids. Any views?

Seems to do the trick - although I had most of what i needed lying around so just needed to buy a power adapter

[Peter Pan]

This looks like a reasonable deal. Thinking of getting it for the kids. Any views?

I was going to say it looks expensive but just totted up the price of components from eBuyer and it looks a good deal! Like Sandy (and many others), most or all of the bits I already for both of my Pi's. If you have some bits, then a trip to the pound shops or markets can often turn up memory cards, keyboards etc very cheap.

I am just configuring one Pi as a media centre (Raspbmc) - now the codecs are out it looks like you can do a lot more with them, possibly streaming live TV

[Lindsayp]

I've not got around to doing anything with my Pi yet, but what I don't want to do is projects ,ore conveniently and easily done on an existing computer. I don't mean to dismiss those who've created media centres, office computers, or whatever, but to me the vitue of the device is that it is a workbench thing for doing device controlling. I'm very interested in the idea of using it for robotics in particular, or in a multiple parallel processing array of Pi's for serious number crunching and modeling. However talk is cheap, I need to extract my digits...