Sunday, August 19, 2012

Wheezy Uptime

So, my raspberry pi was upgraded to a new OS at the beginning of the month:

Linux raspberrypi 3.1.9+ #168 PREEMPT Sat Jul 14 18:56:31 BST 2012 armv6l The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software; the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Type 'startx' to launch a graphical session Last login: Tue Jul 31 22:03:41 2012 from sunray-v480

The OS is Raspbian, a debian wheezy linux distribution for arm processors, with hardware floating point support.

It is such a low power device, it can be on at all time, and consumes less power than my workstation when powered off (which draws 4 watts due to power supply minimum draw to support LAN wakeup). Great for a test webserver, or a monitor (for an alarm system, for motion activated cameras and the like), for kiosks, information displays, for streaming audio and / or video and the list goes on. And it is stable:
  pi@raspberrypi ~ $ uptime 12:33:22 up 18 days, 22:45, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

In an hour and 15 minutes it will have been up 19 days. Not bad considering I installed the OS 19 days ago, and the Pis are still hard to come by...

Friday, August 17, 2012

And the back

Not much to see but the sd card. It is 16gb, so there is plenty of space for installing software. Right now it is running web.py apps

What it looks like

The naked raspberry pi board as it came. I just added the sd card.

New blog, python centric

I'm starting a new blog, very focused. It is a little bit like my Solaris Desktop blog, in that it serves as a journal to record interesting anecdotes, tips and tricks and the like, using a specific computing platform.

In this case, it is the Raspberry Pi computer, and more specifically, using Python as a programming language on it. It is a natural choice, as the Pi was designed to be used in educational circles primarily, and Python is a great language to learn as a first programming language, and yet is equally at ease in mission critical enterprise applications.

I will also sprinkle a liberal amount of retro computing, electronics and science, along with quite a few music references.

[EDIT: I added this section below]

The blog alternates between various languages: english, french, spanish, portuguese and russian

Ce blog alterne entre l'anglais, le francais, l'espagnol, le portugais et le russe.

Este blog varia de idioma, casi a cada articulo. En ingles, frances, espanol, portugues y russo.

Este blog é uma alternância entre Inglês, Francês, Português, Espanhol e Russo.