[OFFICIAL] RaspberryPi: The 25$ PC

[kmihelich]

To be honest, the prospect of building out another full repo isn't exactly exciting. It's not an easy task, and for a single device it would really need to be worth it. It doesn't help that the boards needed to do the work are impossible to get at this stage.. we'd be way behind by the time of a public launch. With my rough estimation of its native power.. it would take a few months for a solid repo even with 2-4 of the devices on my desk.

[crimsonredmk]

This is exactly the problem - the Raspberry Pi is more of a proof-of-concept device, not something you'd want to use day-to-day for anything.

ARMv5TE repositories should work just fine on it, but maybe a little slower.

[pepedog]

I am just building the kernel pkg, will build rootfs tomorrow, and possibly write instructions for install.
What if a million of them are sold, would it be worthwhile then? Assuming drivers for it are around too.

[kmihelich]

What I mean by worthwhile is more than just the number of devices they sell. We'd have to determine if there is a significant enhancement to the usability/capability of the device with a hard-float v6 vfp version opposed to soft-float v5. If it's only a marginal increase, it wouldn't make sense to build and maintain that repo. We'd also need to make sure hard-float drivers are available for anything proprietary in it, and compatible with Arch's bleeding-edge versions.

Additionally, I'd need to have at least two of the boards on my desk to do the building, preferably more so that it can get done faster. I could possibly employ my v7h fleet using a v6 rootfs, since they'd support vfp and the v6 instructions. For a good time comparison, it took my Beagle-XM, Panda, and TrimSlice months to get the v7h repo where it is today. I got the base hard-float system in place around beginning to mid July, when I was finally able to start building out the rest of the repo. And you know well how many issues we've had with packages and getting things building properly.

[pepedog]

Made a rootfs, based upon arm5, only kernel package changed and openntpd install from standard, and a few etc files changed
You need packages dosfstools and parted
As root, and sd card inserted (1st bit of thinking, use dmesg to find the device node) (2nd bit of thinking, the 1700 is the size of card, I could have gone higher with the 2Gb used but being safe, an 8Gb card maybe 7700 would be the figure)
Note that the mac address is set in /boot/cmdline.txt and loglevel=2 (smsc95xx.macaddr=08:00:28:00:60:01), and openntpd sets the date for you.
If the card is /dev/mmcblk0

Code: Select all

wget http://myplugbox.com/rprootfs.tar.gz
umount /dev/mmcblk0p1
umount /dev/mmcblk0p2
parted /dev/mmcblk0 mklabel msdos -s
parted --align=cyl /dev/mmcblk0 mkpart primary fat32 0 100
parted --align=cyl /dev/mmcblk0 mkpart primary ext3 101 1700
mkdosfs /dev/mmcblk0p1
mke2fs -j /dev/mmcblk0p2
partprobe
cd /media/sd-mmcblk0p2
tar xzfv /root/rprootfs.tar.gz
mv boot/* ../sd-mmcblk0p1/
sync
umount /dev/mmcblk0p1
umount /dev/mmcblk0p2

[imissmymind]

will there be a port of XBMC for this device?

[WarheadsSE]

So long as the video can be setup correctly, XBMC is already compile on the v5 repo.

[pepedog]

Can't see it in v5, only v7 and I get the mutex error with that

[WarheadsSE]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/422

[BenedictWhite]

Just to drop by, how many people have had access to Raspberry Pi boards in order to get hardware working?

And indeed, does it?

I get the impression that the mac address needs to be set, so presumably the Ethernet controller does not have it burned in.