Who's been stretched already by their Pi?

I wanted to do a survey, but I don't think that option is open to us plebs

I've only had a Pi for a week and I've had to learn all sorts of stuff - some of it easy to find and other parts those kind of lessons that are maddeningly memorable. Stuff like...

• mounting a memory stick from the command line
• cross-compiling software

I'm definitely being stretched by this, by which I mean I am learning new stuff. I'm loving it and the nice thing is if you screw up your OS you can reflash a new one in minutes. How about you? Are you being stretched? Are you learning something new?

It's stretching my patience, every time the CPU meter reads 100% and it locks up...

Hacking wireless settings on linux. Never done that before.

Compiled omxplayer, tested many different packages to see if they work, samba server setup, extended partitions to fit 8Gb drive. Fixed xwindows start issues.

All without the wiki so I got the sense of achievement when it worked !

Having owned a zx81 this thing is actually not that hard

Had mine about a week as well...

Trying to get my wireless dongle working on Raspbmc is a bit of a headache atm

(This one in case anyone has it working already )
http://www.amazon.co.uk/7dayshop-Wireless-150Mbps-802-11n-Adapter/dp/B004ZDRBJ6/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_2_1

Learning all the time...

Daz

I have learned more about HDMI than I ever wanted to know.

Oh and this was designed as a children's computer (jk, I know that when it gets used in schools it will be using well tested and stable packages).

Things that have stretched (expanded) me:
NFS booting
Cross-compiling
Kernel compiling
Reconfiguring builtin remote control support
Debugging XBMC

Even after 7 years of using linux as my primary OS, I still love learning!

One reason I chose Arch for my RasPi distro, was in the hope that I could carry over as much experience as possible, from running Arch/x86 on my Eee netbook.

In general, I've been able to do just that; however, the Pi's (even) more constrained resources mean that I've had to learn how to evade some problems associated with that (e.g. activating a swap file (only) when building packages from the AUR, otherwise the build fails).

I've been running the Fluxbox window manager partly for its leanness, but even then, there are occasional performance issues, so I'm planning to try the awesome WM, to shave even more memory footprint off a typical X session (and I've never used awesome before).

Yep: the Pi is already leading me into corners of Linux I've never explored before

Had mine about a week as well...

Trying to get my wireless dongle working on Raspbmc is a bit of a headache atm

(This one in case anyone has it working already )
http://www.amazon.co.uk/7dayshop-Wireless-150Mbps-802-11n-Adapter/dp/B004ZDRBJ6/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_2_1

Learning all the time...

Daz

im also struggling to get wireless working on raspbmc ... no wireless tool in there. i have install usbutils and iw but it wont run iwconfig

It's been the first time I've ever done disk partitioning using scary command line programs rather than the nice user friendly ones that come with most Linux installers!
Also been interesting working out how to do things in a more bare-bones environment than a standard box. When I was porting my emulators I had to find a way to detect multiple key presses at once which turned out to be a bit of a journey of discovery - no friendly glut or SDL libraries to do it for me (well, SDL is there but it didn't seem to work outside of X windows), ended up finding out how to switch the input terminal into "raw" mode and interpret the scan codes from the keyboard directly... reminded me a bit of the old days of writing custom interrupt handlers for DOS programs to accomplish the same thing.

(I've been playing with wifi configurations too but haven't succeeded in getting it to work yet).

I'm being stretched out following hard guides and not realizing that there's an easier way that was written weeks after the first one i find on google.. EVERY SINGLE TIME

Had mine for a week, no time except reading the forums. So what I have done is get the sound working through HDMI and chatting with irssi. Just trying to figure out keyboards and usb hubs that work around here.

I'm being stretched out following hard guides and not realizing that there's an easier way that was written weeks after the first one i find on google.. EVERY SINGLE TIME

That's going to happen more and more as more people write guides though. But that's why we're struggling to make things work now isn't it? We will be the guides for the next lot.

Had mine about a week as well...

Trying to get my wireless dongle working on Raspbmc is a bit of a headache atm

(This one in case anyone has it working already )
http://www.amazon.co.uk/7dayshop-Wireless-150Mbps-802-11n-Adapter/dp/B004ZDRBJ6/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_2_1

Learning all the time...

Daz

Hi Daz,

I bought his dongle off ebay (didn't read this post right and thought you said it was already working). Did you get it working in the end, if so how? Also do you have the linux drivers for it as I can't use the mini CD the drivers came on.

Let me know in here and I will get my email to you.

Iain

I "wrote" my first Python game by modifying an example game from Al Sweigart's "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python." I turned the "Dragon Realm" game into "Coin Toss" with just a few changes, going about it like we did back in the late 70s.

Unfortunately, the text covers Python 3, so I can't play my new game on the Pi just yet. :-/

Isn't pygame available on python 3 then? I thought I read somewhere that it was compatible with one specific release of python 3. Or is it not on the Pi?

I've been so busy messing around in Linux that I've hardly touched Python for a few weeks, although I did get my scrabble anagram program working really well (that was before my Pi arrived).

[texy]

The biggest learning curve for me is linux. I found it VERY frustrating to not know how to do the most basic stuff, and I,ve still got a long way to go, but
in a strang eway, its part of the charm of pi, and is also keeping the interest level high. As a side note, as a consequence of having a pi, and using openelec/raspbmc, I,ve discovered hdmi-cec on my TV,and it works. It even now switches over to the correct input source when I switch the pi on, yah!
(only for openelec/raspbmc, don't think it does that for debian, or I haven't checke it yet).
Texy

Isn't pygame available on python 3 then? I thought I read somewhere that it was compatible with one specific release of python 3. Or is it not on the Pi?

It works, but as far as I could tell the pre-built Debian Squeeze and Wheezy packages are just for Python 2.x (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I installed from source, which is pretty straightforward -- but not as straightforward as apt-get install.

1. Download source from here:
http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml

2. Follow the "Installing From Source" instructions here:
http://www.pygame.org/install.html

Double-Plus-Good!

I just updated from Debian Squeeze to Debian Wheezy and guess what I found? Python 3! In fact, the link for "Python Games" on the desktop actually leads to the "Invent With Python" books by Al Sweigart that I've been following. Coolness!