Not sure how many hard core technology guys we have here, but I thought I would share this one.
I finally received my Raspberry Pi and have been playing with it. For those not familiar and who care, more details here (http://www.raspberrypi.org/). It is a single board computer (sbc) that sells for $35, no case, no power supply, no drive. It is about the size of a credit card, although thicker to accomodate USB and ethernet ports.
(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/yKUO6R0u_qZ0R-7pXwz4RQo796p6Agy5PdCQX3JFrXXiRkXdTB5WTJ5MZPjSzijU5GOaAuptQQ)
I have tested a couple of different configurations with it so far. First the not so good.
First I wanted to consider this as an end-point for kids doing homework. All of my kids do their electronic homework on Google Docs, so all they really need is a web browser and PDF reader. So, I put up a basic thin client type implementation with x-windows. The device is short on CPU power but has plenty of GPU power. Unfortunately, xwindows is not optimized fully for the GPU and performance was sub-par. In a few months with some better x optimization this may be an option, but for now they will have to continue to share the home laptop. I am looking at some other options, such as a QT embedded linux which may achieve my goals without the overhead of a full window manager.
Second, I wanted to consider it as an option against and AppleTV. If you haven't looked at one, an AppleTV is not a TV at all, but a media bridge to connect you TV to internet media. We use ours to access our Netflix account, and have rooted it and installed XBMC. Many of our DVD's are now on the network drive and can be played back using the AppleTV. It also can receive content from our phones/iPod's/Tablets using airplay.
I put the latest release of raspbmc on the Raspberry Pi with ease, and it worked fabulous. Using the Free Cable plugin for XBMC I was watching The Big Bang Theory in no time. I enabled the built in web based remote control and the Airplay options in XMBC and very quickly had duplicated all the function of the AppleTV for half the cost. Only drawback I see is the Raspberry Pi does not have WiFi on board, so you have to have Ethernet to your entertainment center.
Last test I ran was to see if I could get a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) up on the device and what kind of performance it gave. My current home webserver is an 8 year old AMD box in a mini-atx tower. It consumes way more power than it should for no more than it does. I installed the ArchLinux image from the Raspberry Pi downloads site, and used pacman to put the A-M-P on my new LAMP device.
(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/cMi130tOcDf6ZUgI_89NYkUlgkCX8moCWyVkQ3IoUzbCm43IOU09fT5nO-lrxa2BF_uzGUZPXQ)
The jury is still out on this one. In my benchmarking using apache benchmark about 10% of the requests were dropped. Response times were OK, but not great. Again, this is a non-gpu application on a device that is heavy on GPU. But, if I can figure out the dropped requests, it is certainly good enough for my basic webserver needs. And for the price and energy used I could put up a three server cluster behind LVS using shared storage from my NAS. And, the $25 option with less RAM would probably work just as well here, especially if I moved the MySQL server to my NAS.
A very fun few hours if you like messing with small SBC's and Linux!
A bit more benchmarking today.
It can deliver about 200 requests per second of a flat 49K html file (output of phpinfo.php saved as a static file).
The same data generated by php gives 34 requests per second served.
Both of these figures exceed the upstream bandwidth I have at my house, so the server is faster than my connection. It will make a great replacement.
Thanks for the Raspberry Pi review. There are plenty new things in the electronic field and more coming, that is why I keep beating away on this older computer I built in end of 2005 start of 2006...Video processing has made some great improvemnets and the solid state drives really get the transfere speeds up. Therefore I am still studing my next build and the gun purchases may have to take a back seat! Hell I still use a Motorola Razar phone without internet or texting. ???
My current laptop is 6 years old at present. New one is on the way with 512 gb solid state drives and 16 gb of ram. I hope it lasts 6 years too.
I looking into this motherboard and some of the features it brings to the new Thunderbolt Onboard technology rated at 10Gb thruput to several devices via daisychain and the Wi-Fi GO! & Bluetooth 4.0, waiting to see what video devices are going to intergrate this technology, like HDTV's. ??? Time will tell! :o
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131850&Tpk=P8Z77-V%20PREMIUM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131850&Tpk=P8Z77-V%20PREMIUM)
I will let you know what I think of Thunderbolt. I am getting three ports on my new machine.
Very interested...Looking forward to it! :D
Hey, NewEgg has a contest running for some neat prizes...
(http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/523863_10151028502304168_1387900671_n.jpg)
here is the link... http://bit.ly/LZ6Xvj (http://bit.ly/LZ6Xvj)
Thanks!