Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

LRADIKAL · # ? Feb 15, 2013 12:12

I want to create a VM on my machine which will have an 8GB ram disk that the pi network boots off of. My media is shared via NFS from the same VM.

How stupid is my idea? Does it make sense at gigabit ethernet speeds? 100 mb? Will the pi access that data over the network faster and with less cpu issues?

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peepsalot · # ? Feb 15, 2013 12:36

Raspberry pi ethernet port is only 100Mbit. I would imagine it would still be quite a bit faster than reading SD. I can't say I've tried networking booting yet though.

armorer · # ? Feb 15, 2013 13:38

rustybikes posted:

Adafruit claims to have 'em: http://www.adafruit.com/products/998

Adafruit's stock listings are accurate from my experience. I bought two from them last year and they arrived promptly. They tend to get them in stock and then sell out in a few days though, so I wouldn't hesitate too long if you want one.

Gism0 · # ? Feb 15, 2013 14:04

Finally setting up my pi tonight, I'm installing Raspbmc which was going well, but it's been stuck on 'Updating service management..' for about 20 minutes now.

Though after reading a few of the comments in this thread I think I'll just give openelec a go instead.

Edit:

I just grabbed the latest openelec image from here: http://openelec.thestateofme.com/?C=M;O=D

Flashed it to a Sandisk Extreme 16GB SDHC card, stuck it in and booted, added my mysql details to advancedsettings.xml, rebooted and.. everything just works! 1080p playback is perfect, and my samsung tv remote worked right away. SO AWESOME!

Gism0 fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Feb 15, 2013

Zuph · # ? Feb 15, 2013 14:05

MCMElectronics has been consistently shipping me Pis in about 2 days for several months: http://www.mcmelectronics.com/

iceslice · iceslice May 20, 2005

Jago posted:

I want to create a VM on my machine which will have an 8GB ram disk that the pi network boots off of. My media is shared via NFS from the same VM.

How stupid is my idea? Does it make sense at gigabit ethernet speeds? 100 mb? Will the pi access that data over the network faster and with less cpu issues?

I want to also do this, but haven't gotten into it yet. Can you be more specific on the setup you're trying?

MohawkSatan · # ? Feb 18, 2013 04:37

First post from my Pi. My only problem now is the lovely old TV I'm using as a monitor can only display 800x600 before things get hosed up. It's damned near i,possible to read even at 1024x768(which I'm using now).

Welp, back to 800x600, and all the screwing around that ensues. On a related note, any know a good cheap LCD screen that's easy to work with? I'm planing on building this thing into an old cigar case I have, screen and all.

Nintendo Kid · # ? Feb 18, 2013 04:59

MohawkSatan posted:

First post from my Pi. My only problem now is the lovely old TV I'm using as a monitor can only display 800x600 before things get hosed up. It's damned near i,possible to read even at 1024x768(which I'm using now).

Assuming you are using an old CRT set, the Pi is actually only outputting a 640x480 or 720x480 signal which is downsampled from the other resolutions you mentioned.

MohawkSatan · # ? Feb 18, 2013 05:09

Install Gentoo posted:

Assuming you are using an old CRT set, the Pi is actually only outputting a 640x480 or 720x480 signal which is downsampled from the other resolutions you mentioned.

It's an older CRT, but I actually adjusted the res in the config files to run as 800x600 to get it running in it's current state because 640x480 was just retarded looking. Even if I'm wrong(and I probably am) and it's being downsampled, this sis the best I've been able to get it looking in my couple hours of tinkering. Next I've just got to overclock it, get it running just a bit faster.

Speaking of which, do you know how to revert to getting the same options menu the first time you boot back? I was an idiot and changed to to go directly to desktop, so the easiest way to access the overclock settings isn't readily accessible to me.

Edit: and whoever said earlier this wasn't a good learning tool was either full of poo poo, or just a damned fool. I'm learning how to use linux better than in several years of running Ubuntu over just a few hours, and I'm learning about the hardware constantly thanks to my plans to make this my primary PC.

MohawkSatan fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Feb 18, 2013

Rexxed · # ? Feb 18, 2013 07:27

MohawkSatan posted:

First post from my Pi. My only problem now is the lovely old TV I'm using as a monitor can only display 800x600 before things get hosed up. It's damned near i,possible to read even at 1024x768(which I'm using now).

Welp, back to 800x600, and all the screwing around that ensues. On a related note, any know a good cheap LCD screen that's easy to work with? I'm planing on building this thing into an old cigar case I have, screen and all.

There's a few options for lcds that take composite in that are made for portable systems or car dvd players. The main problem is that they're not that high resolution, but there's a good selection of various kinds in the $50-80 range.

LRADIKAL · # ? Feb 18, 2013 09:08

iceslice posted:

I want to also do this, but haven't gotten into it yet. Can you be more specific on the setup you're trying?

Oh poo poo! With the help of one of Obama's campaign IT staff (thanks bud) I got it working.

I used FreeNAS on a VM, which was super easy to get going. I set up an 8GB NFSshare (roughly the size of an SD card) on freeNAS opened up the permissions for the IP of my pi and (under the sharing->/mnt/Storage/)set "mapall user" to "root" which gives every user root access to the files contained within. I mounted the NFS share.

code:

mount -o "rsize=32768,wsize=32768" 192.168.1.8:/mnt/Storage /mnt/server

(the rsize and wsize didn't seem to make too big a speed difference)

Then I copied everything over to the NFS share:

code:

cp -ax / /mnt/server

Then I changed the cmdline.txt to:

code:

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.1.8:/mnt/Storage ip=dhcp rootfstype=nfs

A deceptive part of that last bit is that /dev/nfs/ is a "pseudo device" so there won't be anything there. After you save the cmdline.txt you just reboot and it works.

It boots way faster and displays cover art and fanart much more quickly. I noticed that while scraping/scanning videos over my SMB share performance was degraded a lot more than when it is simply writing to the SD card, but the trade in responsiveness the rest of the time is worth it so far. People have suggested that an NFS shared media library is also better performing, so I might do that as well. Apologies for the shittiness of this post, I just learned how to do it and I might have missed some stuff.

Here's some relevant links:
http://raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=5974
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/nfs/nfsroot.txt
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/628/how-do-i-configure-the-raspberry-pi-to-boot-with-an-nfs-root

edit: I also didn't bother with a RAM disk. ZFS should cache anything that is necessary anyway.

LRADIKAL fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Feb 18, 2013

Gism0 · # ? Feb 18, 2013 09:39

For those using their Pi for XBMC, I'm been tinkering a lot with it over the weekend and am happy with my openelec set up so far! Wanted to share what I've learned so far:

* I'm using the latest nightly build from here

* Overclocking a little bit helps a lot, I've found the highest I can go is:

code:

arm_freq=900
core_freq=333
sdram_freq=450
over_voltage=2

Any higher than that is too unstable on my Pi.

* I use mysql to sync libraries, I've found NFS works a lot better than SMB for this however XBMC's built-in NFS system seems to be much slower than mounting from inside linux. So what I've done is auto mount the share by creating a file in ConfigFiles called autostart.sh:

code:

#!/bin/sh
 (sleep 5; \
 mount -t nfs 10.0.0.5:/export/Files/ /storage/files -o nolock; \
 )&

And substituted this path in advancedsettings.xml:

code:

   <pathsubstitution>
       <substitute>
         <from>nfs://10.0.0.5/export/Files/</from>
         <to>/storage/files/</to>
       </substitute>
     </pathsubstitution>

* I upped the buffer settings in advancedsettings.xml a bit too:

code:

 <network>
       <cachemembuffersize>15728640</cachemembuffersize>
 </network>

* I disabled a few things in the skin settings like RSS feeds, weather info, etc.

* Videos with DTS audio are currently a problem, the Pi really can't handle the decoding. You can enable passthrough if your TV/Receiver supports it and they're apparently working on getting licensed to enable hardware decoding in the same way as MPG2/WVC1 is handled just now.

* Analogue sound output causes a loud pop whenever a video starts or ends. See this issue for more info. So until a creative solution is found to solve this you can either use a cheap USB audio device or stick with HDMI audio.

Now I can play back 1080p files without buffering, unless it has DTS audio (One of my TVs doesn't support DTS unfortunately)

I've ordered two more, one for another XBMC box and another just to play with

Stereotype · # ? Feb 18, 2013 10:06

Is there any rasbian download for a distro that is entirely headless from the start (ie has sshd running when I boot it up)? I'm not planning on ever hooking my Pi up to a monitor, so I don't want to have to buy an HDMI cable just to turn on ssh. The most recent version doesn't seem to work at all.

Jonny 290: You said you had done this in YOSPOS but I can't seem to figure out how.

Dirty Needles · # ? Feb 18, 2013 10:13

MohawkSatan posted:

Speaking of which, do you know how to revert to getting the same options menu the first time you boot back? I was an idiot and changed to to go directly to desktop, so the easiest way to access the overclock settings isn't readily accessible to me.

Run sudo raspi-config in a terminal window, should open the config again.

LRADIKAL · # ? Feb 18, 2013 10:39

Stereotype posted:

Is there any rasbian download for a distro that is entirely headless from the start (ie has sshd running when I boot it up)? I'm not planning on ever hooking my Pi up to a monitor, so I don't want to have to buy an HDMI cable just to turn on ssh. The most recent version doesn't seem to work at all.

Jonny 290: You said you had done this in YOSPOS but I can't seem to figure out how.

You can extract the file structure from the image and then put the bare minimum amount of files to boot it on the SD card.
The top answer here goes into it: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/628/how-do-i-configure-the-raspberry-pi-to-boot-with-an-nfs-root

TVarmy · # ? Feb 18, 2013 10:53

I recall reading that you can configure the Raspberry Pi to load the os from a USB stick using a barebones SD bootloader. Has anyone tried this? Is it faster?

I really like the idea, if only because I don't want to buy more 4gb or larger sd cards since I have small ones and USB thumb drives lying around.

Jonny 290 · # ? Feb 18, 2013 18:21

Stereotype posted:

Is there any rasbian download for a distro that is entirely headless from the start (ie has sshd running when I boot it up)? I'm not planning on ever hooking my Pi up to a monitor, so I don't want to have to buy an HDMI cable just to turn on ssh. The most recent version doesn't seem to work at all.

Jonny 290: You said you had done this in YOSPOS but I can't seem to figure out how.

I rebuilt the yosvape rpi SD card this week and confirm that all I had to do was:

-Burn raspbian to SD card
-log into your router admin page, take note of what DHCP leases it's handed out.
-Boot pi while plugged into the LAN
-log into your router admin page after a few minutes, find the IP that it assigned the Pi, ssh in with username:pi, pass:raspberry.

I went ahead and created a fixed DHCP mapping so that on my LAN, at least, it will always boot with the same IP, but it will still boot on a foreign network if needed (advantage over static IP on the pi itself).

Stereotype · # ? Feb 19, 2013 00:28

Hey looks like I was just being dumb in regards to os x devices and just needed to dd onto the raw device. /dev/rdisk1 != /dev/disk1. Thanks though Jonny!

In other news, apparently there isn't enough current on the USB ports to power an external hard drive by itself? Plugging one in causes it to drop out. I'll have to use one with it's own power supply I guess huh.

Sepist · # ? Feb 19, 2013 00:59

I got my RPi over the weekend, dropped Raspbmc on it and picked up an Asus N10 to connect wirelessly to an NFS mount on my main PC. Streaming H.264 video with DTS audio without any problems so far. (full disclosure: Wireless connection is 20 feet away in the bedroom and I only stream 720p video.)

Corb3t · Corb3t Jun 7, 2003

Stereotype posted:

Hey looks like I was just being dumb in regards to os x devices and just needed to dd onto the raw device. /dev/rdisk1 != /dev/disk1. Thanks though Jonny!

In other news, apparently there isn't enough current on the USB ports to power an external hard drive by itself? Plugging one in causes it to drop out. I'll have to use one with it's own power supply I guess huh.

Buy a powered USB hub and you should be fine.

MohawkSatan · # ? Feb 21, 2013 04:46

Anyone know of a good IRC client for Raspian Wheezy? And ow the hell to install it? the only Linux distro I've ever used before this is Ubuntu.

Edit: Just got my nerd on and learned how to use apt commands to find and get xchat. This is fun.

MohawkSatan fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Feb 21, 2013

armorer · # ? Feb 21, 2013 18:50

I am going to be giving a small talk soon at my company on the raspberry pi. The audience will be a bunch of experienced software developers. The talk is coming together pretty well, and gives a general overview and "getting started" type stuff. From there I plan to touch on the Python GPIO library, and then show a few example projects (probably a RetroPie setup and a webservice of some sort running in tomcat on a headless pi.)

If you were to attend a talk like this, what sort of thing might you also like to see? What do you wish someone told you when you were getting started? I have maybe another 10 minutes of time that I can fill and I'm looking for more compelling content.

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Feb 21, 2013 21:03

I just picked one of these up on Amazon! I've been loving with a $20 Belkin router and TomatoUSB the last week or so and it's been tons of fun. I used to build large house roaming robots when I was a kid using Basic Stamps and PICs, so this is right up my alley. I can't wait for this to get here tomorrow and start loving with it over the weekend!

Powdered Toast Man · # ? Feb 21, 2013 21:17

Mine is coming tomorrow, as well. My eventual goal is to use it as a media player...I'm guessing that's going to churn the processor pretty good, so am I likely to need any kind of cooling?

corgski · # ? Feb 21, 2013 21:57

Powdered Toast Man posted:

Mine is coming tomorrow, as well. My eventual goal is to use it as a media player...I'm guessing that's going to churn the processor pretty good, so am I likely to need any kind of cooling?

Nope. Not unless you're going for a massive overclock, and you don't need that for media playback.

If it makes you happy, you can glue a ram heatsink to it, but it wouldn't accomplish much.

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Feb 21, 2013 22:11

Yeah, from what I've read you only need them for overclocking and what not. I did see some heatsinks sized to fit on Amazon with Prime for like $5, so it's not that costly if you do need it.

I also picked up a pretty neat case made from oak. It's 7 layers that are all laser cut, looks pretty sweet!

eddiewalker · # ? Feb 22, 2013 01:24

MohawkSatan posted:

Anyone know of a good IRC client for Raspian Wheezy? And ow the hell to install it? the only Linux distro I've ever used before this is Ubuntu.

Edit: Just got my nerd on and learned how to use apt commands to find and get xchat. This is fun.

Install "screen" and "irssi." SSH into the Pi, run irssi in screen, and enjoy the most convenient and power-saving way to idle on IRC.

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Feb 22, 2013 03:42

So I'm thinking here� I know the Pi isn't powerful to run a bus-powered USB hard drive, however I've got an 80GB Intel 2nd Generation SSD here. You guys think that would run reliably off the Pi's USB?

Rexxed · # ? Feb 22, 2013 04:56

HATE TROLL TIM posted:

So I'm thinking here� I know the Pi isn't powerful to run a bus-powered USB hard drive, however I've got an 80GB Intel 2nd Generation SSD here. You guys think that would run reliably off the Pi's USB?

It's worth trying, but if there are problems you can always put a powered hub on the USB port which completely negates any power issues.

iceslice · iceslice May 20, 2005

Rexxed posted:

It's worth trying, but if there are problems you can always put a powered hub on the USB port which completely negates any power issues.

I don't fully understand how the Pi/USB is powered, but this has been my experience. As long as I have the hub plugged into the Pi's USB and the Pi's power back to the hub, it'll handle whatever I throw at it in the other USB on the Pi.

Nintendo Kid · # ? Feb 22, 2013 05:15

HATE TROLL TIM posted:

So I'm thinking here� I know the Pi isn't powerful to run a bus-powered USB hard drive, however I've got an 80GB Intel 2nd Generation SSD here. You guys think that would run reliably off the Pi's USB?

They consume 60 milliwatts at idle and 150 milliwatts at full load. Should work fine in most cases, however it always helps to use a powered hub.

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Feb 22, 2013 05:56

Cool, I'll give it a shot!

Eventually I'll pick up one of those $17 ultra-small 802.11N dongles from Amazon, but for now I've got cool little IOGEAR Wifi-to-Ethernet box that I'll use.

_{(I love this thing so much for easily putting ethernet anywhere I need it. About the size of a matchbox, powered through a USB port, works with WPS for simple setup.)}

I've also got a 16GB Class 6 Transcend SDHC that I've read will work perfectly, so I'm covered on storage. I was going to buy a little iPazzPort wireless keyboard/touchpad combo, but I found an old USB keyboard in the closet, so I figure I'll use that for now (even has a built in two port hub, though I've read that might pull too much power) until I can get SSHd installed and the Mobile Mouse Pro linux server ported over, then I can just use my iPad/iPhone as a keyboard and mouse for X.

Speaking of SSH, is it included in Wheezy, or will I have to install it? Should I just go with something lightweight like dropbear or what?

Can you guys think of any other hardware I might need or am I pretty much covered for the bare basics? I'm really stoked about this thing! :iamafag:

armorer · # ? Feb 22, 2013 13:29

HATE TROLL TIM posted:

Speaking of SSH, is it included in Wheezy, or will I have to install it? Should I just go with something lightweight like dropbear or what?

If you install the latest Wheezy image, there will be an option in the config screen to enable ssh. So you will need to have it hooked up to monitor and keyboard for the first boot to enable ssh and figure out/configure your IP address. After that though you can go headless.

TVarmy · # ? Feb 22, 2013 16:14

armorer posted:

If you install the latest Wheezy image, there will be an option in the config screen to enable ssh. So you will need to have it hooked up to monitor and keyboard for the first boot to enable ssh and figure out/configure your IP address. After that though you can go headless.

You can also get a terminal via serial to enable network ssh if you have an FTDI cable handy.

I hope newer images enable ssh on first boot. With the limited USB ports, running headless is really useful, especially if I'm doing something web/gpio centric rather than visual.

armorer · # ? Feb 22, 2013 16:28

That's good to know - I didn't realize you could do that. One of my Pis is currently running headless with tomcat installed and I plan on playing around with this GPIO control webapp over the weekend. I will probably throw together a simple html/javascript front end for it, and use it to muck with the connected devices. Eventually I plan to have that pi be a general home automation server hooked up to my x10 firecracker and some additional devices via the GPIO pins.

eddiewalker · # ? Feb 22, 2013 16:48

Earlier on this very same page, Johnny 290 said he SSHed into a fresh Raspbian install to do the initial setup.

armorer · # ? Feb 22, 2013 16:54

eddiewalker posted:

Earlier on this very same page, Johnny 290 said he SSHed into a fresh Raspbian install to do the initial setup.

So he did. I am fairly sure ssh wasn't enabled by default in the previous Raspbian images, but I guess it is now. Sorry for the misinformation!

Space Gopher · # ? Feb 22, 2013 21:23

armorer posted:

I am going to be giving a small talk soon at my company on the raspberry pi. The audience will be a bunch of experienced software developers. The talk is coming together pretty well, and gives a general overview and "getting started" type stuff. From there I plan to touch on the Python GPIO library, and then show a few example projects (probably a RetroPie setup and a webservice of some sort running in tomcat on a headless pi.)

If you were to attend a talk like this, what sort of thing might you also like to see? What do you wish someone told you when you were getting started? I have maybe another 10 minutes of time that I can fill and I'm looking for more compelling content.

If they're experienced software developers, they're not going to be wowed by yet another platform that can run emulators and a webserver - these days, anything with a video output/ethernet port can do that, including the pentium 3 they've had moldering in their basement since the Clinton administration.

Instead, look at the Pi's strength: there's a ton of interesting hardware out there that speaks I2C, SPI, or other simple interfaces that you can use through the GPIO pins. Add a Raspberry Pi, and you've got network connectivity, enough intelligence to do something interesting with it, and enough library support to allow quick development and flatten the learning curve a bit. Demonstrate how a little bit of code can hook cheap sensors and input devices up to an internal webserver, or just about any communication method you want (email, SMS, twitter, SNMP...). A device that tweets "hey, who turned out the lights?" when you put a box over it, that you can honestly say, "I spent a grand total of three hours building this" about, will probably be a much more impressive and interesting demo than yet another runthrough of SMB level 1-1.

(comedy option: do you live in Colorado or Washington?)

armorer · # ? Feb 22, 2013 21:34

I plan to do something like that with the pi I mentioned a few comments back hooked up to an x10 firecracker, with a webapp to control stuff hooked up to the GPIO pins. I agree that this is going to be the meat of the discussion. The retro pie setup is interesting primarily because of how ridiculously easy it is. A number of these folks also have kids who may enjoy tinkering with the pi if they can use it to play video games, so it may be an appealing use case. (Especially in the "your kid's commodore 64" sense.)

When talking to them about the retro pi part I will dive into the user space GPIO driver code that the petrockblog guy wrote in C. I think they will appreciate an overview of how it handles the SNES protocol and communicates with the controller via the GPIO pins.

I don't currently have anything in the talk that uses SPI or I2C. I suppose I could work one more small project in to interface with something that way.

I don't live in the sates you mentioned, so setting up something to water my plants might not carry the intended humor value. (Assuming that's where you were headed!)

Thanks for the input, if nothing else you have made me realize that I should be sure to focus on the "how" and GPIO interfacing more than on the "what".

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Red_Mage · # ? Feb 23, 2013 04:26

Space Gopher posted:

(comedy option: do you live in Colorado or Washington?)

Yosvape has made me want a pi. I intend to use it to make my babby a jukebox mobile, which may be a bit overkill, but where else can you get a microcontroller that can play mp3s for under 50 bucks.