New video from Liam - his Raspberry Pi has arrived!

15th of April 2012 by liz

The most excellent Liam Fraser is our youngest volunteer (he administers our downloads server, is behind a phenomenal series of YouTube tutorials for Raspi owners, and very politely and effectively kicks me when I forget to do things round here). His Raspberry Pi arrived on Saturday, and he’s put up some video about the experience. Enjoy!

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79 comments

ben on
April 15, 2012 at 6:34 pm said:

Awesome
PS. First!

Comment ↓
ukscone on
April 15, 2012 at 6:36 pm said:

you didn’t mention that it was slower than it should be because i was trying to break your install at the same time

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Liam on
April 15, 2012 at 6:40 pm said:

Its great to see the pis in the real world, I cant wait for tomorrow now when mine arrives. I also think Liam does an excellant job with regards to video tutorials, hes taught me a lot over the last few months and more so than my IT lessons

Congratulations Raspberry Pi

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DeliciousRaspberryCake on
April 15, 2012 at 6:46 pm said:

Oh boy just look at all the jealous responses on youtube!

Let’s all hope the backlog can be filled in within the next couple of months.

Is there a firm date yet for the educational release and are the unfortunate developer-release delays going to affect the educational release date?

Comment ↓
- Andy Cater on
  April 15, 2012 at 6:57 pm said:
  
  The delays to the boards for replacing the Ethernet ports and CE and other compliance testing will mean that educational boards are fully ready for their users.
  
  Those of us who ordered early may have been upset by the demand but we now have Farnell and RS pushing into mass production. It’s all good news – and the Raspberry Pi team still deserve all our congratulations.
  
  Comment ↓
  - DeliciousRaspberryCake on
    April 16, 2012 at 12:03 am said:
    
    That’s the thing really. Work on the Ethernet ports and CE/FCC testing was done surprisingly fast.
    
    In the past there were some rumours about constructing an external casing (like see-through plastic or similar) after the circuit board design was done. If there needs to be a case designed, it will mean the raspberry pi is not yet completely ready for educational release.
    
    Additionally there’s the construction of curriculum course material; though I understood these will be community-based projects.
    
    I wish to add that I don’t mean to down-talk the project. It’s a huge achievement the device is now “out there in the wild” in the hands of hobbyists, programmers, enthusiasts, collectors, technicians and whoever was able to acquire one so far. It really is the very beginning of something big. Perhaps Raspberry pi can make computing more physical and less virtual. Think GPIO, but also hopefully letting people see that faster computers don’t mean it’s okay to put abstraction layers upon abstraction layers in programming languages (I’m looking at YOU java programmers). Occasionally you will even have to admit that the rate of software slowdown is greater than the rate of hardware speedup. In absolute terms this means a regression of the computer experience. I think it was Wirth who said this. With the limited computing capabilities of the raspi, software developers will have to take a step back to their roots. What does a program need to do, and what’s the best way to put that into code; rather than having sweet interfaces, fancy graphics and gigabytes of memory for SQlite databases and all sorts of other nonsense.
    
    Comment ↓
    - Jim Manley on
      April 16, 2012 at 8:03 am said:
      
      So, we can expect that you’re going to write an alternative OS completely in binary, right? Oh, that would be really hard without those pesky abstraction layers, like assembly language, right? There are trade-offs with every implementation choice, including how much time and effort needs to be expended to achieve a goal vs. computing resource demands. Every language, OS, development environment, etc., has advantages and disadvantages, and there can be many versions of any of them. In the case of Java, there is a Mobile Edition which is specifically designed to run on resource-challenged systems even more constrained than the Pi, such as cell phones with only a few MBs of RAM, anemic processors, and extremely limited network bandwidth.
      
      It’s a very simple matter to write horribly-performing software in any language – it happens every day. The challenge in developing professional software using sound engineering principles is to balance the tool strengths and weaknesses, opportunity and resource costs, and schedule and financial costs. Choices depend on what’s more important and, as we engineers like to say: “Cheap, fast development time, and computing resource efficient: pick any two.”
      
      Comment ↓
    - ProDigit on
      April 19, 2012 at 1:17 pm said:
      
      couldn’t agree with you more!
      Although most software can be tweaked to not give you that commodore64 bit floppy drive loading feeling.
      
      Comment ↓
James Hylands on
April 15, 2012 at 6:59 pm said:

Can you put chromium os on the rasbery pi and does it work well

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 15, 2012 at 8:12 pm said:
  
  No one has ever tried it, and it won’t be a quick/easy job. You re more than welcome to give it a go.
  
  Comment ↓
Scott Hunter on
April 15, 2012 at 7:12 pm said:

I am a systems engineer, but moved into the world of becoming a Design and Technology teacher. I can’t tell you how excited I am about the PI!! It is a fantastic idea!

I have a quick qestion – does anybody know if the PI could handle a 3D CAD package such as FreeCAD? ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/free-cad/ )

I already have a group of students that have begun drawing plans for a 3D FDM printer, similar to the Makerbot, but using the PI rather than an Arduino.

If somebody could email me back with an answer to the 3D CAD question, I would appreciate it!

Hunterscotty@hotmail.com

Comment ↓
- jbeale on
  April 15, 2012 at 8:31 pm said:
  
  Remember the RPi main processor is the speed of a Pentium 2 at 300 MHz, and the entire system has 256 MB ram, some of which is taken up by the GPU. If any given software runs well in Linux on such a system, then it will run well on the RasPi. And, the converse applies as well.
  
  Comment ↓
Ben W on
April 15, 2012 at 7:39 pm said:

What are the chances of running old Archimedes, Amiga, Spectrum, etc software on there? Games that a mobile-phone screen would be too small to run? And/or languages (e.g. AMOS)? With that in mind, could you work with the team at the National Museum of Cumputing at Bletchley Park to benchmark the Raspberry Pi against some classic British (and foreign) home computers from the 1990s, 1980s and earlier?

Comment ↓
- Ben W on
  April 15, 2012 at 7:45 pm said:
  
  ^ Whoops! Sorry about the typo above [maybe you could edit it out when you moderate the comment/question? and maybe you could add this link? http://www.tnmoc.org/hands-on.aspx ]
  
  Comment ↓
- JasonS on
  April 16, 2012 at 1:55 am said:
  
  The Pi should have enough grunt to emulate those systems – though some emulators might need additional work/tweaking to work well.
  I think you’ll probably want to limit your expectations for Amiga – the A500 should be fine, not sure about AGA/higher clocked machines though I’d be happy to be wrong about this.
  It certainly won’t be long until we know though.I was thinking about adding a matrix to the wiki describing which systems run, and how well.
  
  Comment ↓
chris on
April 15, 2012 at 8:17 pm said:

Could you try to mount a samba share and play a video?

thanks

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John on
April 15, 2012 at 8:45 pm said:

I’m aware there are a handful of XMBC projects in progress at the moment, I’m not sure on their level of maturity, would you be able to investigate now you have a shiny new Pi?

Great video, and fantastic to see despite a few set backs the project has prevailed and boards are now in the hands of (lucky) individuals.

Comment ↓
- Fred on
  April 15, 2012 at 10:12 pm said:
  
  I second this request. I am looking to use this mainly for video access and playback. Thanks so much for your tutorials and I look forward to getting my board and the the case kit I am getting From ModMyPi.
  
  Comment ↓
Ultracopier Ultimate on
April 15, 2012 at 9:35 pm said:

What is the more slow, storage device, cpu, gpu? (In desktop usage)

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 16, 2012 at 7:49 am said:
  
  Storage devices are always the slowest part of a system. Although your post does look like spam to me…
  
  Comment ↓
  - Ultracopier Ultimate on
    April 16, 2012 at 10:41 pm said:
    
    Depends of you usage, with linux cache/buffer, in my case it’s mainly the cpu the limitation.
    
    Comment ↓
Andrew Jones on
April 15, 2012 at 9:57 pm said:

Is Scratch included in the new Debian release?

Comment ↓
- Andrew Cater on
  April 15, 2012 at 10:53 pm said:
  
  There is at least one Scratch package in Debian Testing/Wheezy – squeak-plugins-scratch
  
  Comment ↓
Semtex on
April 15, 2012 at 11:49 pm said:

Great job Liam. Can you tell us what brand, class and size of SD card you were using please?

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H.C. on
April 16, 2012 at 1:15 am said:

It would be nice to show if Apache runs well…

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- nicknml on
  April 16, 2012 at 2:07 am said:
  
  It would be interesting to see how apache, bind, samba, and even openvpn perform.
  
  Comment ↓
- Daniel on
  April 16, 2012 at 9:17 pm said:
  
  I’d rather give lighttpd a try on the pi.
  
  Comment ↓
Dazzler on
April 16, 2012 at 5:22 am said:

Only right Liam managed to get his mits on a first batch Pi for all his hard work and efforts on the project. Now put it back in the box Liam and get on with your exams

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Bastian on
April 16, 2012 at 7:38 am said:

Good for Liam he got his Raspberry. I’m looking forward to mine, but it’s a little difficult over here in Germany

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- Sebastian on
  April 16, 2012 at 10:08 am said:
  
  I live in germany too and I got the Congratulation-Mail from RS Comp (for being in the first batch)… but still no message about ordering… you too?
  
  Comment ↓
Hans L on
April 16, 2012 at 9:09 am said:

Would it be possible to run glxgears? I’d be curious to see the framerate performance.

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Jaseman on
April 16, 2012 at 9:30 am said:

Can you please update the FAQ page to reflect that Debian is the supported OS – Not Fedora? Otherwise it’s a bit confusing.

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SN on
April 16, 2012 at 9:35 am said:

Request to Liam: – can you pull the Gambas2 package set onto you Pi and see if it runs without a Segmentation Fault please?

Comment ↓
- rew on
  April 16, 2012 at 12:08 pm said:
  
  > Need to get 52.3 MB of archives.
  > After this operation, 143 MB of additional disk space will be used.
  
  That’s quite a lot. If I remember I might try that later.
  
  Comment ↓
Rasi on
April 16, 2012 at 10:40 am said:

Thanks Liam. Can you try to install JVM on the pi ?

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rew on
April 16, 2012 at 11:19 am said:

Wohoooo!!!!

Anybody know the username/password for the debian image posted a while back? (not the 13-04 one, that one is still imaging to my other SD card….)

Comment ↓
- liz on
  April 16, 2012 at 11:33 am said:
  
  pi/suse
  
  Comment ↓
- rew on
  April 16, 2012 at 11:35 am said:
  
  Forget about it…. The new image is done imaging….
  
  Comment ↓
  - rew on
    April 16, 2012 at 11:47 am said:
    
    Thanks Liz!
    Rereading my comment may sound a bit rude, with your post inbetween my two. I didn’t see your reply before I posted that and being rude to myself I find acceptable, not to you. So: Sorry…
    
    Comment ↓
    - liz on
      April 16, 2012 at 12:25 pm said:
      
      No probs – I thought that was probably what had happened!
      
      Comment ↓
NML on
April 16, 2012 at 11:30 am said:

Using the gcc toolchain, could you demonstrate compiling in FORTRAN.
Source file called “source.f” containing 2 lines (the END is mandatory):
PRINT*,2.0+2.0
END
bash command:
$ gfortran source.f -o executable 2> errorfile.err &
Many thanks.

Comment ↓
- rew on
  April 16, 2012 at 11:57 am said:
  
  wolff@raspberrypi:~$ gfortran source.f -o executable
  wolff@raspberrypi:~$ ./executable
  4.0000000
  wolff@raspberrypi:~$
  
  Comment ↓
  - NML on
    April 16, 2012 at 12:24 pm said:
    
    Excellent. Many thanks for doing that.
    In all the talk about other languages, I was a bit worried someone may have left out the FORTRAN.
    
    Comment ↓
Marian on
April 16, 2012 at 11:35 am said:

These teasers are killing us, do you know that ? Do it one more week and your audience will be reduced due to massive suicide around the world.

Comment ↓
Jack on
April 16, 2012 at 11:42 am said:

I’ve been having a look at Fedora 16 on my laptop (running from LiveCD). Any chance you could try that out and see how it runs? I need to know whether re-downloading it on perilously slow internet and putting it onto an SD card is worth my while!

Comment ↓
- rew on
  April 16, 2012 at 11:59 am said:
  
  I”m not going to do that anytime soon. I’m more used to debian-like OSes (Ubuntu). I was going to run Debian even though Fedora was recommended, but now Debian has been promoted to the recommended distro…..
  
  Comment ↓
problemchild on
April 16, 2012 at 12:32 pm said:

Well mine’s arrived. UPS as delivered it to my neighbour whilst I’m here at work ;( !!

So no excusses new Job and new toy …. Christmas in Spring time ..COOL !!

John

Comment ↓
Your nameJason Young on
April 16, 2012 at 1:53 pm said:

A little slow can be a good thing. It could encourage programmers to write code that uses the hardware more efficiently. When David Braben co-wrote Elite he used some very clever techniques to get the most out of the hardware.

Comment ↓
NickMon68 on
April 16, 2012 at 2:46 pm said:

Can you cover setting up SAMBA please

Comment ↓
- Lars T. Hansen on
  April 17, 2012 at 5:43 pm said:
  
  sudo apt-get –assume-yes install samba
  
  Comment ↓
marketing on
April 16, 2012 at 4:38 pm said:

Wow waiting so long for this!! And finally now in distribution :) Long life to this new device!

Comment ↓
Mark Gowdy on
April 16, 2012 at 6:07 pm said:

Awesome, well done.
I was planning on running a DLNA server (if I can ever get to order one).

Comment ↓
sam on
April 16, 2012 at 6:56 pm said:

oh dear,oh dear,oh dear,oh dear,oh dear,oh dear.

Come on! its not a toy so way handle it like it is.

breaking the rpi is easy but getting replacemant isnt

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 16, 2012 at 7:08 pm said:
  
  Er, what are you trying to say?
  
  TBH, it’s not that easy to break one.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Steve on
    April 18, 2012 at 9:32 am said:
    
    Maybe ESD precautions?
    I certainly had a “my god, don’t handle it like that” moment during the video.
    
    Comment ↓
    - Liam Fraser on
      April 18, 2012 at 10:14 pm said:
      
      Still working well. I’m not sure if it was James H on the ofrums but someone said they just throw it into their bag and apparently it’s still fine.
      
      Comment ↓
Joseph Harry Bunce on
April 16, 2012 at 7:11 pm said:

Can you see how chrome/chromium web browser works on the pi.

Comment ↓
CP/M on
April 16, 2012 at 8:39 pm said:

So, the impression I am getting is that it is v e r y s l o w .
Reminds me of the time when someone replaced the BASIC chip in a ZX81 with FORTH and an extra 2k of RAM – Claimed it had enough computing power to run a nuclear power station. I suspect there will develop a minimalist clique who will cut graphical interfaces on both O/S and applications to the bare bones – run wholly in memory on the RasPi and acceptably fast, too. IMpompousO, there’s too much form over function these days. ‘Bout time kids learned to tinker under the bonnet (hood) again….

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 17, 2012 at 8:38 am said:
  
  You are aware its a 700Mhz Arm (about P3 300Mhz speed)?
  
  Comment ↓
  - CP/M on
    April 18, 2012 at 7:43 pm said:
    
    My first PC (after a Beeb) was a 386sx, so no criticism of the RasPi – 300 MHz is a huge amount of computer power – provided it’s not wasted on unnecessary graphics and services. Consider the early Novell servers – simple text-graphics menu system which took hardly any resources – unlike the later Windows servers. Horses for courses. Learn to remove anything which isn’t needed to give that little bit more memory, that little bit more speed, to get the job done. My concern is an expectation that the RasPi will be expected to perform like a dual-core 3GHz straight out of the bag, with most of those cycles achieving nothing.
    
    Comment ↓
    - Liam Fraser on
      April 18, 2012 at 10:16 pm said:
      
      Yeah I have that concern too. Which is why I guess I kept reminding people not to expect a powerhouse.
      
      Comment ↓
Joshua Haynes on
April 16, 2012 at 8:46 pm said:

Quick Question, how about the media center Distro? Also. Will it run 16-bit games just fine?

Comment ↓
Andrew on
April 16, 2012 at 9:34 pm said:

Liam, could you run ffmpeg encoding to see, what to expect in that area?

Comment ↓
Sparky on
April 16, 2012 at 10:23 pm said:

Nice one, Liam. Thanks for the demo.
Great tutorials as well on YouTube.
Tiz appreciated.

Comment ↓
elatllat on
April 16, 2012 at 10:58 pm said:

Request to Liam:
Please fill in some of the missing benchmark here:
http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiPerformance

Comment ↓
Problemchild on
April 17, 2012 at 1:09 am said:

Mine as too only another 300K or so then the first lots will be happy
Thanks to every one who put in loads of time gettingthe project off the ground!

http://shropshirelug.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/raspberrypi-unboxed/

Comment ↓
Shaun on
April 17, 2012 at 3:19 am said:

Silly off topic comment here… To my not-well-traveled American ear, it seems like Liam and Eben have a very similar accent (which to me sounds different than the typical English/British accent I am more familiar with). Is that a regional accent, or am I just hearing something that isn’t there?

Sorry for the off topic comment, accents have always been interesting to me…

Comment ↓
- NML on
  April 17, 2012 at 11:04 am said:
  
  OT
  
  Recommended viewing to explain this side of the pond:
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady_(film)
  Song #2 “Why can’t the English?”
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister
  
  Both available from a certain well known e-commerce vendor in the US.
  
  Comment ↓
Jim Manley on
April 17, 2012 at 5:14 am said:

Another outstanding video from Liam! Give him a double ration of whatever he likes and is legal for a 17 year-old to drink

I would like to ask one tiny, miniscule favor of our videographers – please, please, please use a tripod when shooting video, and if you can shift to video from the screen itself (rather than a camera aimed at the screen), that would be greatly appreciated. The tripod is needed to keep some with motion sensitivity from losing their lunch (not me, but a good friend suffers from this). If you can’t even get one of the mini-tripods meant to sit on a desk, or the gripping kind with bendable legs, then at least put the camera on a pile of books, or clamp it to something. The worst combination is holding the camera in one hand and an object (e.g., a Pi board) in the other hand – then you have _two_ things moving in free space, and I have to admit that, on close-ups, even I can retaste my lunch, and I spent a career sailing the bounding main on LGBs (Large Gray Boats ).

And We Thank You for Your Support,
Bartles and Jims

Comment ↓
neil on
April 17, 2012 at 8:20 am said:

Has anyone tried using a class 10 sd card with the pi ?

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 17, 2012 at 8:33 am said:
  
  Please search the forum – this has been covered.
  
  Comment ↓
killor on
April 17, 2012 at 9:40 am said:

Can update the RPI measures to make the cases?
Thank you very much!!

Comment ↓
Manjot on
April 17, 2012 at 11:38 am said:

“Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 raspberrypi tty1″ When booting I cant seem to get past this line. Any suggestions?

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 17, 2012 at 11:43 am said:
  
  Please post on the forum – you won’t get much response here.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Manjot on
    April 17, 2012 at 11:47 am said:
    
    Ok, thanks.
    
    Comment ↓
Simon Hyde on
April 19, 2012 at 12:59 pm said:

Will it run Pure Data http://puredata.info/ as I am keen to use it for Live Video mixing

Comment ↓
- JamesH on
  April 19, 2012 at 1:06 pm said:
  
  No idea, doubt anyone has tried it. Also doubt it could handle real time video mixing without GPU help, and I seriously doubt that is in place.
  
  Comment ↓
ProDigit on
April 19, 2012 at 1:10 pm said:

Try running the OS from a USB stick instead of the SD card.
Compare booting time,
USB Flash is supposed to be faster.
Fastest USB sticks I’ve tried so far are corsair and the top/performance line of transcend.

Comment ↓
Daniel on
May 29, 2012 at 3:35 pm said:

Hi,

When i run startx on my Pi Debian I get:
Linux: Disabled on system
Signal 11 (segmentation fault). Server aborting

Can anyone advise?

Comment ↓

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