Raspberry Pi

Remember there's an even cheaper version coming out, the model A. No ethernet port, but probably attractive if you wanted to buy ten of them for teaching purposes, and the postage cost is going to be low.

Cost effective for projects for the third world. Besides, those second hand/discontinued laptops are going to need new batteries or homebrew power sources. The Pi draws well under 3 watts (can be run off AA batteries, small solar arrays), has no mechanical parts and is cheap to ship around being so small. I think it still represents a more economical proposition, even requiring an SD card (they are cheap and plentiful, also cheap to ship) and power supply (increasing numbers of folks in third world countries have basic mobile phones and can use the chargers that come with them), compared to variously dodgy hand-me-down kit plus the Pi will equate to less 'landfill' being dumped on said countries.

Sorry. You realise it's running a full blown Linux?

The GPIO basically

Heh. There's a RISC OS image for it so you can run BBC BASIC.

The power draw of the actual thing is a red herring. You can do fuck all with a Pi on its own. What do you do for your screen for instance?

Apparently Raspbian doesn't yet have support for HTML 5, amongst other things (so no Youtube, for instance).

You can run it headless, huge amounts of computers don't use screens

XBMC has a YouTube plugin.

All manner of server roles, or a data logger (with built-in web server to present said data, if you wish), handy little router, etc.

Ah so your beef is with the distro, not the OS. Raspbian is a work in progress as is made quite clear on their website plus the announcement on the Raspberry Pi site itself.

Yep. I'm vaguely tempted to get one. I think I might be able to just SSH into it from my computer running the screenreader. Would like to try something like routed or gated on it. (And I keep meaning to have a go with Perl.)

e2a maybe not the routing stuff. Only has one ethernet port afterall.

What distro comes on it as standard? *JFGI*

None, you do that yourself

Needs teachers willing and able to teach programming, too.

Not sure how common they are in secondary schools (?)

Doubt 'able' is very common, but I'm sure plenty would be willing. Train 'em up or employ some that can also cover other subjects, and give them a syllabus. Very doable.

I'd like to see it in primary education tbh.

OK; now you're moving into a massive national programme rather than anything that'd be remotely feasible atm

I wouldn't disagree, but you're talking about one hell of a change / investment there!

Programming has to come into the syllabus at some point, so I don't really see the advantage in waiting!

Yeah it will eventually come in the point is that how many programmers to raspberry pi are you really going to get? Even if the ratio ends up being very high it will be worth it.

Have managed to lay my hands on a Gooseberry (1GHz A10 cpu, wireless only, somewhat more expensive than the RPi though faster) but it's going to have to wait a bit until I can find some time, and a spare microSD card to play with it.

I noticed last night that plex seems to work on this, if anyone wanted a dirt cheap media client on a network.

I was thinking about using one as a file and media server using debian and plex.

And then another to run XBMC as a streaming and media channel on the TV.

just got one with a case, love it

got XBMC on it, iphone XMBC remote to control it, watching family guy now on 1Channel

My brother bought me one of these for Christmas, it's very sweet

Even a relative technology simpleton like myself managed to get it up and running with XBMC on it. For £30 & peripheral costs it's superb. Highly recommended and lovely to use with your smart phone as a remote control.

I've been thinking about doing something like this as its always a total hassle when I want to go to a freinds house to watch something I've downloaded, and they have to vga it to the TV and then listen to it through laptop speakers.

Basically could work like a portable media center yeah? I dont need one for at home as I've got apple tv's attached to both my telebox's and I stream from my mac via plex, but with this I could get a whopping huge sd card on and XBMC plays pretty much every format doesnt it?

Could it handle bluetooth? And if so, how many connections?

yup, it's tiny and you just need a mini USB power lead.

don't use mine loads as i got WD live, but i do like it

Got one of these for Christmas. Am ridiculously excited about using it once I get the necessary bits and pieces. The last programming I did was on a BBC micro.

I keep thinking I should be interested in getting one of these.
My interests lie mainly in the area of remote monitoring and control .. and I'm starting to wonder about modifying cheap PAYG phones ...

My 1986 Sinclair project taught me a fair bit about computer architecture, but never became a viable device for running my life - and in any case I changed my mind about what decisions I wanted to be taken from me .. and then the modern PC and the Interweb came along ...

I got mine a week ago, and it runs both of those at once.
It runs raspbmc perfectly well, and sits on the network 24/7 as a torrent and file server for the rest of the house. I can access it from outside the house by SSH or web, add and remove torrents with ease. The xbmc is great, and can handle full 1080p. It is awesome.

The analogue audio is crap, with a click every time a track starts/stops - but this is a software problem and will be sorted out. You can avoid it by using a USB sound card or an HDMI splitter (£30) to output digital audio separate form the HDMI video.

Oh, and I can also use it as a web proxy to avoid using the work web server.

It is slow at times, but tweaking here and there can optimise it well (a class 10 SD card, overclocking, cron to schedule tasks to run at low-usage times, deprioirtise certain programs when others need the CPU...)

Recently added mini dlna so it's now a upnp media server as well. It managed to steam batman and spiderman both in hd simultaneously. Will have to look into getting an hdmi splitter as that's the main reason I'm not using it with xbmc at the moment.

Fairly new to Linux in general, So what do you reckon would be the easiest distro for the RP to get it up and running. i.e. DHCP client and Openssh running by default?

editted. I already said that last year.