Caltrops - Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego





	[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]I have connected up one of a couple of Raspberry Pi units I bought several months ago but haven't gotten around to using. I bought the kit version, which includes the SD card with thew operating system already installed, the power supply (the Pi uses a sub-mini USB connector for power, in theory I suppose you could run it off a powered hub from another computer) and the video cable, that allows me to plug it into a TV set and view it as a direct connection. I also pulled a spare Ethernet cable out of a drawer and plugged it in, then borrowed a keyboard and mouse )both USB, of course) and plugged them in. Fired it up and had to fiond the login credentials through a web search (username is pi, password is raspberry), then that gets me to a shell prompt. Type startx and X Windows comes up, and I am using the Midori web browser to access this site. Keyboard is OK except I think it's mapped slightly oiff, the pipe key, the vertical bar, shows as a tilde. Buth the mouse is recognized as 3 buttons and the scroll wheel works. I think the development of tiny but powerful computers like the Pi - it has 512MB of memory, it uses an SD card for booting and storage, has an 800mhz processor and costs $39 retail (the kit cost $89 because it has the extra components plus a breadbord kit) can be a significant game changer. The first new computer I bought in 1995 was an eMachines Windows 95 machine with 256meg of memory, 333mhz processor, 4gb of disk space and cost $400. This device is 10% of that price and has more than twice the capacity of a machine from 20 years ago. Plus you can run it on a TV set, you don't need a monitor. Or if you customized the operating system to use a different runlevel (the underlying OS on the Pi is BSD) so it either ran as root or started up an application under a non-privileged user, you could run it headless as a specialized device or service provider,, and possibly do some amazing things with this. [/quote]