This video was on yesterday’s Look East, and has just appeared on the BBC’s website. It’s only two minutes long – enjoy!
Monthly Archives: April 2012
More video from Liam: Arch Linux, Quake 3, getting audio working and more
You’ll need a spare 20 minutes to watch this (and I have to admit, a spare 20 minutes is not something I expect to have any time soon, so I kind of skipped through; but I liked the bits I saw). Liam’s been very busy since his Raspberry Pi arrived yesterday. Arch is a great option for the Raspberry Pi; it’s a nice light install, and Liam’s having great success with it. Enjoy!
And the unboxings begin…
17.30, April 17: A lot of people are now posting their own first startup and unboxing pictures and videos in this thread on our forums – please drop by and join in!
There are unboxing pictures and videos all over the place at the moment, now some lucky folk’s Raspberry Pis have turned up on the doorstep. I’ve chosen a few at random, along with a couple of pictures of what people have been doing with their Raspberry Pi in the first few hours they’ve been running them. Now, I know some of you are driven mad with jealousy by these, if what you were saying on Twitter yesterday is anything to go by. So this will be our only unboxings post – make the most of it, everybody else!
First up, video from Tec Team Ltd. The game of rugby they play with the box at the start had me feeling queasy – thank God (or, alternatively, the good people at element14) for the padded packaging.
Alex Rathbone has Legends of Yore running on his Raspi already
101blog has a post-unboxing video and a desk that’s even messier than mine.
Simon Owen had SimCoupe, a SAM Coupe emulator, running on his Raspberry Pi within a very short time of getting his hands on it.
Some more unboxing on Tumblr (unembeddable, so you’ll have to follow the link to watch the video).
An unboxing picture set on Facebook.
A post from raspi.co.uk, a Raspberry Pi fansite.
And here are our very own Liam’s unboxing pics (which are really rather good, especially the one with the unmade bed in the background). 
On Twitter, @hobbsy discovers his Raspberry Pi will not fit in an Altoids tin. A chorus of "Didn't you read the FAQ?" ensues.
New Arch Linux ARM build
If you’re one of the lucky people who received a Raspberry Pi in the post today, and fancy trying something new, why not grab a copy of the Arch Linux ARM SD card image from our downloads page? To obtain the latest firmware and kernel type:
pacman -Syu
Thanks to Dave (pepedog on the forums) for bringing Arch Linux ARM to Raspberry Pi.
Some fun video from RS
Raspberry Pis have been arriving on doorsteps this morning, and RS Components just sent me this video of last week’s delivery to their distribution centre in Corby. Eben doesn’t usually move this fast without the promise of chocolate cake – it made me grin like an idiot.
New video from Liam – his Raspberry Pi has arrived!
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!
New Debian release, Wi-Fi tutorial from Omer
A couple of quick news items on Sunday morning:
Some of you may have noticed that we posted a new Debian “squeeze” release on the downloads page yesterday. This contains several performance enhancements, including enabling the 128K system L2 cache for the first time, and Dom’s first-cut ALSA drivers.
Omer Kilic has produced a tutorial showing how to get some brands of Wi-Fi module to work with the latest Debian image.
Deliveries have started!
It’s been a hell of a 24 hours. We’ve been driving up and down the country meeting the people packaging and sending out the Raspberry Pis, doing masterclasses with kids, meeting and eating with our very excellent graphic designer Paul Beech (more meetings should involve bread and dripping, we think) and doing yet more filming with the BBC. We’re not sure when/if it’s being broadcast – we think we may have been bumped by a very photogenic story about a rapidly deflating hot-air balloon and some overhead power cables – but we did get some great pictures from the session with the children. I sincerely don’t know how you teachers do it. I found myself wanting to go and hide behind the whiteboard to do some heavy breathing halfway through the lesson just to get a respite from all the (very smart) questions we were being asked.
Eben shows the kids how to modify a game of Snake. We ended up with the guy sitting to Eben's right (our left) producing a lovely replica of The Matrix's falling green letters (he subsequently made his Dad late for an appointment - sorry, Dad). Some others introduced score counters, the boy Eben's with in the picture learned how to give the game a finish line - and a good time was had by all.
A few people have got their Raspberry Pis today, and more should be arriving on doorsteps on Monday. Serial production has begun, so the backlog should be cleared sooner than some of you were hoping, and we hope that this means that some time over the next week or so element14 and RS will be able to give you firmer delivery estimates than we’ve been able to generate so far.
And finally: how’s your Japanese? Mine’s non-existent, but I still think this is my favourite piece of TV coverage yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETYnmFr5o_s
Some TV coverage from today
As RS Electronics and element14/Premier Farnell are preparing over the weekend to send out the first boards, we’ve had some more TV coverage which you might enjoy. For some reason, ITN is using Vimeo (why does anyone use Vimeo?), so I’ll link to the article and video on their site rather than embedding it here – you’ll see packing going on towards the end of the video. One of those boxes might have your Raspi in it.
We also had a spot on Newsround today (Newsround is the BBC’s news program for kids). As usual with these broadcast videos, the web version doesn’t have captions, but the fella with the beard is Professor Alan Mycroft, one of our Trustees; and the younger guy in the lab is Alex Bradbury, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and one of our most stalwart volunteer developers. I really enjoyed watching this – it’s another piece where a kid is given a Raspberry Pi to play with (in this case, Ivo is using Scratch for the first time), and his reaction is just great.
Here’s a bonus picture of Eben partway through loading our car up with half of that pallet of Raspis you saw in the pictures from last week, to take to the distributors. (The nice thing about the Raspberry Pi is that it’s so tiny, you can easily fit a thousand in an estate car at a time if you put the back seats down.) We won’t have to do this again, thankfully; from now on, element14 and RS are making them and shipping them to the distribution sites themselves.
Scep, one of our forum members, found a bain marie in a skip last week. For those wondering, the skip here is full of garden waste, not Raspberry Pis..
There should be more of this sort of thing to come in the next week, as Raspberry Pis start shipping. Watch this space!
Some news in a quiet week
We’re busying ourselves with lots of boring administrative stuff this week while we wait for sign-off on last week’s testing. I am sick of spreadsheets. Our partners hope to begin shipping units to those at the front of the queue around the start of next week – when units start to ship, we’ll reopen the store on this website so you can buy merchandise (just t-shirts to start with, but more stickers are on order, and we’ll be expanding to mugs, brollies and other items as we go along). We’ll also be opening a donations page when people start being able to get their hands on Raspberry Pis; as you probably know, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity which is currently run by volunteers and one part-time employee, and we would welcome your donations to support us in our educational work, more research and development, and taking on some more staff.
Myra, our Educational Co-ordinator, is sending units to a small number of developers we have pre-selected outside the Foundation this week. If you have received an email from her, it is legitimate; some people have contacted us because it didn’t come from her Raspberry Pi address, and were worried it wasn’t genuine.
Work is ongoing here on a new Debian “squeeze” build, which, among other things, contains the firmware update we needed to pass EMC testing, enables the system-level L2 cache and comes with new ALSA drivers (they’re alpha-quality at the moment). We’ll be releasing that before April 16.
We’re planning on running a programming competition (prize to be announced, but we hope we can make it a really good one) some time over the next month or so. We’ll be running regular competitions for different age groups – all age groups, as we don’t believe education stops at 18 – as part of our emphasis on education, but the first one will be open to anybody who fancies trying their hand at a bit of Python; as well as getting you lot coding, it’ll help us to work out how best to organise later competitions. If you want to polish your Python in anticipation (and especially if you’re new to Linux), you might want to install RacyPy on your PC; I’ve been playing with it this week, and it’s a great lightweight OS for Linux beginners with PyGame preinstalled, so you can get straight to learning the language.
And Mooncake, the Official Raspberry Pi Cat, has hay fever, which is just awful for anyone standing within snotting-range of her when she sneezes.