Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter daz
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When I've had issues with odd partitions on removable media then the "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool" (google for a download link) is a good fall back to wipe everything back to a single partition.
 
bledd. said:
OpenELEC / Raspbmc / XBian

Anyone got a preference after testing all 3 to save me some time? :)
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Found Xbian too slow.. Will try another over the weekend.

Most videos played fine on it, but menus were too slow and took a long time to start playing each video.

Some very high quality mkv's stuttered every 10-15 seconds or so.

Are there any less resource heavy skins that look / behave similar to Confluence?


This is running from the SD card, is it worth running from USB instead?
 
Kobi said:
Cheers, I wasn't running it off the USB stick. But more annoyingly, it changed my 16gb stick to 70mb. Now i cant change it back.
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As Evilpaul mentioned it's probably just done some screwy partitioning, you should be able to format it with a little utility

bledd. said:
Found Xbian too slow.. Will try another over the weekend.

Most videos played fine on it, but menus were too slow and took a long time to start playing each video.

Some very high quality mkv's stuttered every 10-15 seconds or so.

Are there any less resource heavy skins that look / behave similar to Confluence?

This is running from the SD card, is it worth running from USB instead?
Click to expand...

I've been using raspbmc since the beginning and it seems pretty good... they've got their own "optimised" version of confluence since a few updates back which seems to run a little better than the stock skin... The windows installer also has options to install to USB or over NFS which is handy (I've not tried the NFS option yet but intend to at some point).

The USB install seems to run better to me (than my Class 10 Sandisk Ultra), running from a cheapo "Integral" USB 3.0 stick. Menus all feel totally smooth and slick (the only exception being when the library is updating/scraping, but that's not surprising really). Overall pretty happy, the only problem I've had has been a mysterious problem with the network interface on my Pi sometimes just failing (or it may be SD corruption that causes it I'm not sure).

A few points to note though:

- For *all* XBMC based installs I expect this would apply, I was getting some very annoying freezing issues (not stuttering, freezing and then resuming after several seconds) even on bog-standard SD content. There is an entry you can put in the "advancedsettings.xml" file which has fixed it completely for me (touch wood) and I've not had any problems since. I'll look it up and edit it into this post when I have a moment

Edit: it's this (courtesy of Frozennova in a different thread):
Code: 
<advancedsettings> 
  <network> 
    <cachemembuffersize>157286400</cachemembuffersize> 
  </network>
</advancedsettings>

However I didn't use the above value (~150Mb) because I read that the Pi will take the value and allocate around 3x that amount of RAM to the buffer. With a 256Mb model Pi this would almost definitely cause major problems. I actually set mine to ~10Mb instead and it has been perfect since, but I expect it's a case of tweaking it until you get something which works for you - good luck!

- If you use the raspbmc installer with USB be careful not to have a USB externall HDD or anything plugged in when you run the installer, as it will auto-detect a suitable USB device and overwrite the whole thing without asking (well, a warning message displays on the screen with a countdown - 60 seconds to turn off the Pi or respond to the prompt or it will continue)
 
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bledd. said:
Some very high quality mkv's stuttered every 10-15 seconds or so.
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Are you using a Samba connection to your media?
The overhead for using Samba is just a little too much for the RPi to cope with but if you overclock a smidge then it can be acceptable. It is better to use NFS if you can, or have the media local to the RPi (USB HDD).
 
I'm trying to get my pi to connect to the internet through my computer but not having any luck. The pi is wired to one of my PCs ethernet ports and the PC is connected to the router via wifi. I've enabled internet connection sharing as detailed here on the wifi connection and changed the settings for the wired connection to obtain an IP automatically but my pi doesn't seem to be able to see the internet. Am I missing something really obvious?

Thanks
 
Well raspbmc (or the pi itself) has once again crapped out on me (network interface failed) so in desperation I decided to try out OpenELEC instead... The installation process was quicker but there was no nice installer options for USB or NFS like in raspbmc (I haven't had a chance to test whether I can move the install after-the-fact, can anyone comment?)... I'll post back with my observations once I have more of a chance to test it
 
Well ive got Rasbmc running on both 256 & 512mb versions, very well, it even streams tv from the tv tuner card in my server. And since I started running it via Ethernet rather than wifi, streaming 1080 files has been smooth as anything.
 
I got no complaints about how smooth raspbmc ran, it was totally fine for me, but every once in a while, say 1 in 5 times I booted it up I would get out my Yatse remote and get no response at all from the pi... Rebooting didn't fix it, I was not able to get a connection via SSH, and if I plugged in a keyboard between reboots and exited XBMC to the command line I found that the pi seemed to think that the network interface itself no longer existed...

At that point the only option it seems to me is to re-image the SD card and re-install raspbmc... Not the end of the world but this maybe takes 45 mins in total and is really annoying having to keep doing it, especially if you just sat down to watch a movie or an episode and find you can't until you re-install it AGAIN... I'm not blaming raspbmc 100% for this as it could be a number of things, but I can try to rule it out by giving OpenELEC a go now - plus the OpenELEC install is a straightforward image rather than an installer - so it doesn't take very long at all to get back up and running again if it goes wrong
 
Ok, so i wiped the USB and installed raspbmc back on it, and again it shrinks it to 70mb, this normal? Would you also say its wise to wipe the SD card as it will try to boot off that first? I can only guess if you have 2 raspbmc's plugged in, it'll choose the SD card first.
 
Kobi said:
Ok, so i wiped the USB and installed raspbmc back on it, and again it shrinks it to 70mb, this normal? Would you also say its wise to wipe the SD card as it will try to boot off that first? I can only guess if you have 2 raspbmc's plugged in, it'll choose the SD card first.
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Can you explain how you're installing to the USB? The correct way is to put an SD card in your PC and use the raspbmc installer to put the image onto it, but there is a checkbox which says "install to USB" which you need to check... Is this how you did it?

If so then what's happening is it installs the root of the filesystem onto the USB drive which it finds plugged into the pi when you boot it... But the SD card is still required to boot (it's just that it basically says to the pi "ignore me and try to boot from your USB slot instead")

How are you verifying that the USB has "shrunk" to 70Mb? If it's by putting it back into your Windows PC then it may just be because the remainder of the space on the drive is formatted (by raspbmc) to a Linux native filesystem which Windows cannot read, but rest assured it is there - if you log into the pi over SSH you'll be able to check the capacity from Linux and should see the "missing" space

And in case it's not clear from above - if you have a raspbmc install on an SD card and another one on a USB it will boot from the SD card, since it always initially tried to boot there and only ends up booting from another device if the SD card tells it to

Hope that makes sense!
 
Oh no, my sd card was one with NOOBS on it. so when i first booted up, i installed raspbmc. Then i went to the website and got the raspbmc installer and put it on my usb stick. But i think i see where i went wrong. You mean i should use the raspbmc installer on the sd card(with install to usb) and then plug it back into the Pi along with an empty usb stick?

I found out the usb stick has shrunk to 70mb because windows says its 70mb and in raspbmc under system settings it says the same.



EDIT: cheers for all the help. Everyone in here is very helpful.
 
Kobi said:
Oh no, my sd card was one with NOOBS on it. so when i first booted up, i installed raspbmc. Then i went to the website and got the raspbmc installer and put it on my usb stick. But i think i see where i went wrong. You mean i should use the raspbmc installer on the sd card(with install to usb) and then plug it back into the Pi along with an empty usb stick?

I found out the usb stick has shrunk to 70mb because windows says its 70mb and in raspbmc under system settings it says the same.



EDIT: cheers for all the help. Everyone in here is very helpful.
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Just to confirm, I've not used NOOBS before so I can't be sure but it's definitely correct that you should use the raspbmc installer to image the SD card and never the USB itself - this should just be plugged into the pi along with the SD card when you first boot up, at which point raspbmc will install itself onto the USB. After that point you need to keep both the SD card and USB plugged into the pi...

The 70Mb must be because the raspbmc installer assumes that you're installing onto a USB from an SD card so it only bothers to create a small 70Mb partition and wastes the rest of the space (which is obviously fine when installed correctly as described above - you don't need the remaining capacity of the SD card anyway)
 
Yup correct. NOOBS puts the whole thing onto the sd card. so i wiped it and installed with (install to usb). Now its running the correct way. Cheers! i can Figure out how to mount my external hard drive another day.
 
Super impressed with the Pi! Handled my Star Trek Into Darkness 26gb file like a dream. True trying to access the menus while playing was very slow, but i wasn't needing the menus so that was fine. possibly see about a slight overclock to help with that. i bought one of those wee heatsinks when i bought my Pi, so that should hopefully help.
 
Hi all,

I am looking to buy a Pi, for general use but mainly for streaming media, I am guessing the B revision with 512MB is the one to go for? I keep hearing that 256 model is ok and you unlock memory? is this correct or not?

What are the essential items for the kit if I am going to be running XBMC

I will be using this from a 1080p 24" TFT monitor with HDMI output, although the speakers on monitor are shoddy, so I will output the sound through my PC speakers.

Thanks for any info in advance :)

Also without trawling through pages of this thread, what are the main and biggest bugs that I should be aware of?
 
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As far as I'm aware there is no process to "unlock" the 256Mb pi, the 512Mb is a completely separate model. I can't think of any reason not to get the model with higher RAM at this point

For XBMC you're going to want:
- The Pi itself
- Perhaps some sort of case (though you can get by without - cut holes in the box!)
- An SDHC Card, decent speed Class 10 recommended
- Hdmi lead
- Power supply, it's crucial that you get a good quality stable 5V supply which delivers at least 1A, but honestly the higher amps the better (I use a 1.2A but I've heard of people using much more)
- Ethernet + maybe powerline adapters... You can use wireless, but for reliable streaming you'll have a much easier time with powerlines or a wired connection

The main distros for XBMC seem to be at a fairly decent state now to be honest, but as with anything of this nature there will be problems along the way XD
 
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