Forum Thread: Raspberry Pi - Let's hear your thoughts on this.

Ahem… Some of us being hardware illiterate, what are we looking at?

This is a great find! It most likely runs linux, and it would be pretty easy to make a virtual presence with a microcontroller like this, or any manner of robotic devices :) personally, i have used arduino based controllers for my robotic needs, but paired with this, it would be unstoppable. 

This is a very small pc, for all intents and purposes. You can run Quake on it! :) well thats not its only use. But hey why not?

:) in fact, i wonder how difficult it would be to use this to control other, bigger boxes in a render farm?

I will actually be buying one of these devices, It is running a basic ARM processor and with the GPU it can decode 1080p videos with out stuttering. I am going to use it as a quick home media center, or use it for a physics experiment.

My only issue with them is that the gpu drivers / video decoders are all closed source.  Only binary blobs are supplied. 

This means no video decoding or fancy graphics in non-linux operating systems. 

Well Windows and Mac OSX can't run on an ARM processor also the RAM wont allow Windows to run either, but I am planning on throwing Arch onto this thing when I get it.

Actually, windows 8 runs on ARM, and IOS devices are running on a pretty similar ARM / VideoCore (broadcom ) setup.

What is the physics experiment you are going to do? 

Maybe a spur of the moment experiment, I haven't really though of it that much.

But RasPi only has 512mb of RAM if I am not mistaken so it wont be able to run Win8 as most of us know that Windows NT shell is a system hog.

when do these devices become available? i thought they were already released but turns out not? 

I think they are out, I am waiting for a bulk order because I know a few people who want one, I plan on the B model and a few others want the A model.

I just read about how PirateBay is launching RasPi as a symbol of their determination against any and all who try and shut down their operations! :)

Sweet that means get them while there hot.

I have one coming.. it was ordered in Feb.. will probably not show up until ~July :'( 

How much did it cost? Where did you get it? What do you intend using it for? :)

Don't know.. was a gift :D.  I am planning on printing ( 3d printer ) an expanded base plate for my happy hacking keyboard lite, then shoving the little pi in that. 

I am also going to attempt to get OpenBSD running on it.. but I am not too hopeful on that one ( at least with X11 and what not ).

OpenBSD or not, it will also double as a mesh router.