CRiSP On Raspberry Pi

I finally received my RaspberryPi today (heretofore, RPI). RPI
is a nice little device. Shame it doesnt presently come boxed, but
future editions will do so.

Its also a shame (or good?) that RPI now has some competitors -
USB flash drive self contained computers. For now, these are vaporware,
and, until recently, RPI was vaporware too.

I quickly got it up and running - one advantage of not getting a RPI
on the day of release, is that the web is now chock full of tips
to getting a RPI working.

Having gotten the device, I am getting a 64GB SD card - the 4GB one
I am using lets me get off the ground, but project#1 is to connect
the RPI to active speakers and use it as a music device.

Alas, my cheapo USB wifi dongle is appearing flakey, so am going to
get another one, and hope this works. (Presently, the existing dongle
loses the connection after a few minutes, and a reboot or pull-out /
plug-in, is required to restore sanity).

I am trying to get CRiSP built/installed on the device - the first
new "CPU" port of CRiSP for quite a few years (the last was
for Itanium). This is proving pretty straightforward, but the wifi
is making life a pain (ie go sit in front of the TV/screen).

I am planning to release CRiSP for RPI as a free product - no licensing,
just to give "something back to the community". It will appear on the
crisp download page (http://www.crisp.demon.co.uk/download.html) in a few
days when the port is ready.

If I can clear the backlog of bugs and issues, then I may take a poke
at looking at dtrace for RPI. This in theory should be straightforward
but it will be painful to compile a kernel on the fairly feeble 700MHz
CPU, so I may have to look at cross compiling. The 256MB memory of an RPI
may prove a limitation too.

No dates on dtrace - purely we will "see".

I have some potential other "projects" to do on the RPI. First is
the music server, second is a video server - ideally on the same physical
HW as the music server, but I dont think this is doable with only
one audio out (although it might be if sound solely comes from the external
speakers...need to experiment).

The other project is to replace the very aging G3 imac which serves
as the CRiSP FTP repository - a simple ftp/web server. This should be
very untaxing - but ideally I want some cased RPI's before attempting
this.


Post created by CRiSP v11.0.4a-b6363