Media Centre - because we know we all want to...

Right - let's get back on track!

For anyone that's vaguely interested in this sort of thing, the fact that the Raspberry Pi has the potential to be used as a media centre has been once of the most talked about points.  Now, for anyone paying closer attention to the project, you'll have read that there's a lot more this than plugging it in and getting a state-of-the-art media centre.  This is still early days for the Raspberry  Pi project (remember, we're still technically in the developer release stage) and the main focus is the educational release due out at the end of the year.

Thankfully, this is where the community comes in.  There are a large number of people out there working on projects like this, and they're doing an awesome job!!  The two main projects I've been looking at are OpenELEC and Raspbmc.  Both of these are full media centre operating systems (they boot into an operating system that is a dedicated media centre rather than a standard desktop) running the XBMC interface, or XBox Media Centre.  This is the interface that runs on the original XBox.

So - let's start with OpenELEC.  This is a well-established solution that has been ported to the Raspberry Pi.  It's still under development, but is feature-rich.  As an open source project, the code it out there for anyone to download and compile, with a lot of published information on this.  If you'd like to try build it yourself, take a look here:
http://elinux.org/RPi_building_and_installing_OpenELEC
Alternatively, you can get the latest build here (thanks sparky!):
http://sparky0815.de/
An for up-to-date builds, published by members of the community as they built it, take a look here:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=89072
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=68324
And of course if you'd like more information on the project itself, take a look here:
http://openelec.tv/

Next, there's Raspbmc.  From what I can make out this is a fairly new project, based on the Debian distro and XBMC, written specifically for the Raspberry Pi.  While you have the obvious downsides to a new project like this (bugs, stability, etc.) there are a lot of positives - you have a product aimed specifically at the Raspberry Pi, without the distraction of different targets, distributions, etc.  At first glance, the added benefit of Raspbmc is that is has an installer that automatically downloads the image and applies it to the SD card.  I've always had issues with creating an SD card other than using DD for Windows (see here), this seems to write without a problem.  So - here's where you can download the installer:
http://www.raspbmc.com/download/
And that's about all you'll need!

So - that's my first pass at a review (and first post in a few weeks!).  I'll apply these images, test them out and post my feedback soon.

EDIT 24/11/2012: I've had a play with the latest 2 images and am pretty happy with what I've seen.  I'll go into more detail soon, but for now you can find the images here:
Raspbmc - http://download.raspbmc.com/downloads/bin/filesystem/prebuilt/raspbmc-rc5-prebuilt.img.gz
OpenELEC - openelec.thestateofme.com (Thanks Chris Swan!!)

And out the other side!

So - after having my in-laws stay with us for close on 3 weeks, I finally get to play with my Pi again!  Thanks for all your comments over the last few weeks - I have been reading them, but haven't had much free time.

For those of you not too focused on the Raspberry Pi site, there have been a few interesting developments.  First off - how would you like to see the Raspberry Pi voted in as Innovation of the year?  Vote now!

And here's another one - Google are quite interested in the work the Foundation is doing - so much so that they're investing in a bunch of boards, training a bunch of new teachers & sending them into schools - read more here!

So - what next for my Pi?  I think I'll be tackling getting it properly hooked up to my network - either by getting a cheapie wireless USB dongle working, or finding a way to get it working through a 2nd wireless router.  I'm thinking of using a spare Netgear router as an access point, routing onto my Linksys router upstairs.  I've been digging around and found sites detailing how I can update the firmware to work in client mode.  Not 100% working, but once I crack it I'll post it.

Browsing issues & other browsers

Now that I've had a chance to play around with my Raspberry Pi I've started looking at more mundane things like browsing.  I've been using the browser the Pi ships with - Midori.  While it sees OK, I've noticed several stability and performance issues.

The main issues I've found are as follows:

1. When loading each page the CPU spikes to 100% for 3-4 seconds.
2. When loading this blog the CPU spikes for a few seconds then then Midori crashes completely
3. Gmail can only be used under the HTML mode
4. While browsing the Raspberry Pi site & forum it seems OK, although when trying to reply to a post the CPU hits 100% and sticks there and keypresses are delayed by about 10 seconds.  If I move out of the reply window the CPU drops and responses are OK, if I click in the window again CPU spikes

Some helpful advice from the forums led me to Chromium.  This is an open-source version of Google's Chrome browser (As I understand it, Chromium is the open source code created by Google that produces their Chrome browser - other developers have taken than same code and created the Chromium browser).

I've installed it and it looks pretty good.  Issue 2, 3 & 4 above are resolved, and although the CPU does still spike a lot moving between pages, it doesn't seem to affect general performance too much.  Overall, I'd say definitely give it a go.  This should provide you with everything you need to get it up and running.

Quake 3!!

Thanks to a lot of people on the Raspberry Pi forums, I was able to get Quake 3 up and running with a fairly small amount of effort.  As I don't own the game itself I'm simply playing the demo levels, but that's more than enough for now, as I've realised I'm particularly bad it would seem.  I wasn't ever much of a gamer, but was addicted to Quake 1 & spent a fair amount of time on Quake 3, but it would appear the years have robbed me of the meagre skills that I spent days and weeks of my youth building up.

But, regardless of the number of times I've had to start a new game, it's still bloody cool.  Playing it at 1080p on my 40" LCD looks beautiful!

As with the other tutorials I've created separated pages for them - hopefully this should give you everything you need to get Quake 3 up and running.  As always, let me know how you get on, and if you hit anything I haven't covered.

Setting up VNC

While the Raspberry Pi does provide a superb picture over hdmi, there are a lot of scenarios where one might not need a display, and connecting remotely via VNC will suffice.  For instance, any programming could be done remotely, while still having access to the physical hardware.  It's also particularly useful when the TV is in use and getting it back to "play on" isn't an option.

EDIT 29/04/2012: I've had a done a bit of a clean-up on my blog, creating separate pages for specific tutorials, keeping the main page free.  You can find the VNC guide here, or click on the tab at the top of the page.

Initial thoughts

I've had my Raspberry Pi for 4 days now so thought I'd provide some feedback. 

On the whole, it's definitely living up to my expectations, although if you're looking for gaming machine, media centre of something that is a finished, production-ready product then you might a little disappointed.  As it's been said many times before, this is a development release, aimed to get people using the hardware and software and helping to improve the product to a state that it's ready for schools at the end of the year.

First impression - it's smaller than I had expected, and very light.  It fits easily into the palm of my hand and feels like I'm barely holding anything at all.  I don't have any concerns about strength - everything on the board feels stable and solid.  The Ethernet jack & USB ports seem quite tight (snug rather than worryingly tight I'd say) and therefore need a bit of a wriggle to disconnect, but I felt confident to (gently) do this without fear of it coming apart in my hand.

Booting up it's nice and fast too.  As mentioned in earlier posts the Debian image boots up in less that a minute - I timed it at 50 seconds when poised & ready to log in.  LWDE is responsive with no massive lag that I've seen.  Every now and again I've found a spot here and there where I have to pause for a second or so after a window's opened before I can start typing.

As far as networking goes, everything seems to work straight out of the box.  Connecting my Pi to my laptop (configured with Internet connection sharing) it immediately picks up a DHCP-assigned IP Address and can go online.

I've tested out SSH and this also works without any setup required.  I tried using this in a headless setup with just power & Ethernet connected as I plan on using it like this going forward and it was relatively painless (see my other post with the details on setting this up).

So - any issues?  Just a few.  I've found a few stability issues with the Midori browser - when trying to browse and log into twitter the CPU spikes.  Browsing to mobile.twitter.com appears to work without issue.  When browsing to this blog CPU spikes again, and after about 5 seconds it crashes completely.  Issues with JavaScript perhaps?  Audio doesn't work either, but there are reports of a fix on the way.

 To sum it all up - great device with a lot of promise.  Any issues should be quickly resolved as there are a lot of people out there hard at work to resolve this.  This is what everyone, especially the foundation, has been waiting for.  It's time for the community to step up and take this product to the next level.

Let's boot this up, shall we?

After admiring what a awesome little thing this is, I decided to plug it all in.  I'll say upfront here that I've been pleasantly surprised at the performance.  I'd heard several gripes about speed, but from plugging the power in, logging in and launching the GUI it took less than 60 seconds.

For this I used my Samsung Series 6 40" LCD, using a fairly standard HDMI cable (can't remember where I got it).  I'm using a 4GB Class 4 Kingson card with the latest Debian image.

Let's plug it in (HDMI, keyboard & SC card - power pending):

The first thing you see it a login prompt.  The latest credentials for this version are pi and raspberry.

Once logged in I just need to run startx:

And there we have it - Debian running on the Raspberry Pi!

Here you can see the Pi running at 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz:

You can see it all in action here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HSNb9Jlg_k