Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter daz
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I've been ignoring the Raspberry Pi as I had no interesting in developing anything with it, but I just had a thought about a role it could fill for me if it can do it 'out of the box' so to speak.

Being able to playback media to my TV using HDMI is great, and from what I understand it can do this at 1080p which is perfect, but there are other needs I have and am hoping someone knows if the following is possible with it. Can it run irssi 24/7? I used to run irssi inside Screen on ubuntu before the machine running it had a hardware failure and I haven't sorted it out yet, but if I can set up a low power raspberry pi to run 24/7 and just let me SSH into it, and then reattach the screen with irssi in then that would be great.

Also, I've seen some videos of being able to use a web browser on it, but can this do everything a normal browser can? for example If I want to browse some youtube videos, can it do that? or is it more just text/images but no flash?
 
Dist said:
Can it run irssi 24/7? I used to run irssi inside Screen on ubuntu before the machine running it had a hardware failure and I haven't sorted it out yet, but if I can set up a low power raspberry pi to run 24/7 and just let me SSH into it, and then reattach the screen with irssi in then that would be great.
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It can easily do this, irssi is quite lightweight on memory. Personally I run WeeChat and bounce the messages to XChat, but it's the same thing in principal.

+1 for whoever pointed out OpenELEC having HDMI-CEC support now, I'll be upgrading that realllllll soon.
 
So what's the situation with these now, is there still a massive backlog or can I order one now and get it in a week? Is it worth holding out for a cased version with any potential bugs sorted?
 
desires said:
So what's the situation with these now, is there still a massive backlog or can I order one now and get it in a week? Is it worth holding out for a cased version with any potential bugs sorted?
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Nope you'll still be expecting to wait a few months at least. I don't think they'll come with cases until the end of the year.
 
Trying OpenElec now, very easy to install but oh my the performance seems much much worse than Raspbmc. Menus seem much slower (especially with art) and I'm having problems playing some movies that play fine with Raspbmc. I'm going to leave it turned on overnight in case it's still updating art etc. in the background but I can see myself going back to Raspbmc tomorrow if it hasn't improved. HDMI-CEC is nice though. :)

I think I'll buy a second SD card so I can keep a stable version and then mess around with newer/other releases with the spare card.
 
Evilpaul said:
I've found the recent OpenELEC builds to be really good now, performance has improved to be as good as Raspbmc.
I'm not sure which build you are using, but try this one which I've just built from source:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14198219/OpenELEC-RPi.arm-devel-20120610214600-r11286.tar.bz2
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That's the build I'm using, I went from Raspbmc RC2 to that. I am doing back to back comparisons and OpenELEC has trouble playing some of my larger movies and menus are much more laggy, especially the art. I'll keep messing around with openELEC today but there is a clear difference on my setup so far.

I'll grab some video of both if I get time.
 
Try logging into the Pi over SSH and running 'top'.
When updating data I see XBMC usually taking up all available processing power, but once everything is loaded then it will sit around 7-8% processor usage in menus.
 
Evilpaul said:
Try logging into the Pi over SSH and running 'top'.
When updating data I see XBMC usually taking up all available processing power, but once everything is loaded then it will sit around 7-8% processor usage in menus.
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Yes it's the xbmc process taking all the CPU, I've left it for a couple of hours though and it doesn't improve. On the flipside Raspbmc is using exactly the same library and is up to full speed almost instantly - within a minute or so of installation.

Maybe I'll leave OpenELEC running overnight or something and try and see what it's having problems with, I have two SD cards now (same brand/model/batch) - one with OpenELEC and one with Raspbmc so I can mess about a bit. Unfortunately work has been getting in the way a bit.

Edit: Reading up then 7-8% CPU use sounds very optimistic? People on OpenELEC forums seem to think around 80% is the norm when in the menus. I'm hitting 95-100% even when playing movies without menus though so something is going on. I've disabled RSS feeds as suggested but no joy. I think I'll leave it overnight.

Edit2: Just checked and Raspbmc is about 20% CPU in the menus, so I guess I should be aiming for around that on openELEC.

PS. for any others reading and thinking "What a hassle" - it's really not, Raspbmc works fine for me - I just like to mess around. If I wasn't a tinkerer I'd have happily stayed with Raspbmc, put the Pi behind the TV and forgotton about it apart from for xbmc use.
 
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boxman2000 said:
Still waiting for my Pi but quick question - does the Pi support wake on lan?
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No, I've seen an online interview where Eben said it could not be contained within the target price.

boxman2000 said:
Also with something like an MCE remote can you start/shutdown the Pi?
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I can't think of a way to do that without an external board to control the power input to the Pi board.
 
Em3bbs said:
Reading up then 7-8% CPU use sounds very optimistic? People on OpenELEC forums seem to think around 80% is the norm when in the menus. I'm hitting 95-100% even when playing movies without menus though so something is going on. I've disabled RSS feeds as suggested but no joy. I think I'll leave it overnight.
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There have been recent improvement to optimise the menus for the Pi, so if the comments about 80% processor usage are over a week old then you can ignore them.
I'm 95% certain that in-menu processor usage is down in the 7-8% range. I'll check again tonight and post a copy of my guisettings.xml for comparison.

I had some issues with both OpenELEC and Raspbmc when I had some meta data stored with my videos (fan art, series info, actor info, etc.). XBMC would continue at 100% usage after a scan completed, or even on loading movie thumbnails. After I removed the meta data then everything started running properly again.
 
Is there any way to play Netflix on this yet or is it pretty much impossible due to Silverlight requirements?
 
Longbow said:
Yes that's what I typed, about 10 times. For some reason it didn't work.
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I had a problem here too.. IF you don't have a working internet connection on the ethernet port then the Raspbmc installer will just dump you to a logon prompt with an unknown (to me anyway) password.

IF you have a working LAN connection then it will download and install the system properly.

** If you are not trying to install Raspbmc then ignore me**
 
OK, I did a clean start of the Pi which then scanned my videos and music over NFS for changes. After finishing the scan and changing to the top level movie menu (recent movie thumbnails shown on screen) the processing settled down to this:
menuuy.png


Here is my guisettings.xml for comparison:
http://pastebin.com/NrsNZmKM
 
Longbow said:
For some reason the login/password pi/raspberry won't work on Raspbmc.

Why does it even have a password to begin with?
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Use the RC2 img from their news page. I had this problem when I used the default img that has been downloaded by the installer.
 
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