Raspberries

[altivo]

The real raspberries and blackberries here this year were completely destroyed by drought. They turned into shriveled brown pellets without ripening.

The Raspberry Pi single board computer, on the other paw, arrived and is functional. At the moment I can only use the composite video output, which is kinda "furry" looking but legible. I'm waiting for an HDMI to VGA breakout box to arrive so I can use a standard monitor.

I've tried out two Linux configurations on it: Debian "squeeze" and ArchLinux. Debian, as usual, comes up fully configured with defaults that you may or may not want. Arch installs with a console only setup, no GUI at all, and requires you to add packages in order to build the GUI and environment you want. There are things to be said for each. Arch, for instance, uses a textual config file that let me adjust the overscan settings for my television easily. Debian has that configuration buried somewhere that I haven't yet found.

In any case, yet another Linux configuration arrived on the scene just today. Dubbed "Raspbian," it's the next release of Debian, optimized to use the available hardware acceleration on the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6 CPU and video. That includes, as I understand it, hardware floating point assist, and some degree of AGP video performance, using a chunk borrowed from the (limited) 256MB of RAM in the system.

Even the default Debian is certainly usable, though not exactly zippy at all tasks. Loading some programs takes significant time, though they run fast enough once loaded.

There is also a version of RISC OS available, though it's in beta at the moment so I'll wait for a final release. I know enough UNIX and Linux to play with a beta, but RISC OS is terra incognita to me.

In other news, it's very hot again. And the baby owls were here tonight. We hadn't seen them since last Friday night, but three were at the birdbaths once again right after sunset.

Comments

[casey382]

I have some corn planted in my little garden. The one ear I can find has tasseled out, and the silk is yellowed. Is it ready to pick? It's a small cob. And these plants have been watered daily. My Broccoli is doing well. Lots of tomatoes, all green at the moment.

[altivo]

I wait until the loose ends of the silk on the ear start to turn brown.

Our blueberries all turned brown and shriveled too. At least we finally got some rain last night, but still less than an inch.

[hrrunka]

My second home computer was an early RiscOS machine. Served me well for a good number of years, but it's now non-functional, the hard-drive (40MB!) having been the primary point of failure...

[altivo]

Ought to be easy enough to replace that drive.

RISC is interesting. I liked the IBM RS/6000 machines a lot when I worked with them. Also like the DEC Alphas and still have a couple of those.

Raspberry Pi is moving along slowly. Power was out last night, but when it came back on this morning I got a sane enough config onto it to make the composite display on a television readable.Debian with Gnome boots and runs OK, but haven't tried linking it to the net so far.

[hrrunka]

The disc interface is pre-IDE, and they stopped making compatible drives the best part of 20 years ago... ;)

Good luck with the Pi.

[altivo]

Yep. I've purchased those old drives off EBay before when working with pre-IDE stuff, like Radio Shack or Compupro computers. It's been a while, but they weren't too expensive ten years ago.

I suppose that might make it not worth the trouble though. I just like using old equipment to do modern stuff.