Raspberry Pi

[Baggypants]

You could fit a half dozen in a netbook case with a little hardware KVM switcher to change which one you are actively addressing/viewing, and it could still run on batteries.

Skip the KVM and have one running dedicated VNC / RDP / X11 Sessions

[adam]

practically speaking then, would a cheap android tablet do as the controller thing?

configuration i'm thinking is a tablet plus a cheap keyboard & case then a bunch of these stashed beneath or behind

[Baggypants]

practically speaking then, would a cheap android tablet do as the controller thing?

configuration i'm thinking is a tablet plus a cheap keyboard & case then a bunch of these stashed beneath or behind

I guess, although compare the price of an Android tab to a monitor and a mouse and the ability to run loads RDP sessions in windows next to each other I suppose.

[Gorecki]

They've finally gone into production. Looks like it's just a matter of weeks before we can get our hands on one (or at least attempt to get our hands on one in the inevitably oversubscribed scrum that will result from the first day of sale).

[disciple]

It's be nice if it had gigabit ethernet. Currently I can see having one as a file server, another as a torrent server and another running squeezebox all reading writing to the common file server storage, 100 Mb/s tho.

Is there a better way to do this? Like maybe some sort of fast networking over the USB interface via a hub so they can talk between themselves at >100Mb/s. Or maybe some way a hard drive can be plugged into all 3 simultaneously and shared via the OS on each one? (unlikely)

[toxibunny]

I fancu getting into a bit of simple games programming on this, using python and Qt. What's it going to be like in terms of performance? Would a gauntlet type thing be possible, or would that be too much stuff?

[benedictw]

It can run quake3 - I think it can do gauntlet.

[toxibunny]

Aye, but quake 3 wasn't written in python though...

[teamonkey]

So is anyone planning on bidding on one of the beta boards?

Up to £2,050.00 now, with free shipping.

[Stone]

They have another video up of Quake 3 running on the Alpha:

That's properly impressive. I remember spending over a grand on a machine that ran Q3A that nicely!

Still have no need for one but I love that the tech's available. Will be really interesting to see what uses it gets put to when it's released!

Stone

[teamonkey]

Can I just point out how mental this is.

Just look at this nonsense.



It costs $25. You can power it off 4 AA batteries. It runs Quake 3.

Mental.

[ThetaReactor]

And the sockets occupy more space on the board than the working bits...

[Firefox]

I think it's especially cool that the foundation actively want companies to clone the hardware. Hopefully it'll be all of five minutes before Chinese factories start cranking 'em out...

Meanwhile, all ten beta boards are up on ebay now. Both #01 and #10 are at £2,100 bid, #09 is at £930; the rest are all at ~£700.

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

Manufacture is go!

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509

[benedictw]

Ace!

Alas, manufactured in far east because:

Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.