After hearing about these things from a friend, I decided to get a Raspberry Pi. It is a genuine computer and I am using it right now to write this post. Took me less than a half an hour to set it up right out of the box. It is a bit slower than my usual Core 2 Quad Dell Optiplex, but what the hell. It only cost forty bucks, and it runs on a streamlined version of Debian Linux called “Raspbian,” which is quite easy for me to use as I am already a Debian user. So I like this thing. It is fun, and I am blogging on my TV screen, simply because the RPi needs a monitor with an HDMI output, and the TV is the only one I have which has that. The only annoyance so far has been that it installs with a British keyboard layout which means password hell if you don’t change it to US (as some of the characters are all moved around), but that didn’t take long to change. It plays music quite well, and the web browser works (or else I wouldn’t be writing this post).
It is the tiniest computer I have used so far (well, unless my mobile device counts, but the pi is smaller than that).The biggest problem I see with all this miniaturization is that to really feel comfortable, I need not only a screen that is easy to read, but a keyboard I can actually use. You know, with my fingers?
SO, while smaller is indeed beautiful, there are practical limits.
Comments
2 responses to “How small can we get?”
Neat.
I don’t really think of the RasPi as a “computer” as such, but it (or a BeagleBone, or an OLinuXino, or…) is a handy way to put Linux in a small space, with a moderate bit of CPU power (as in, not too far behind the high-end PCs of a decade ago).
I’m currently using the li’l rascals for data acquisition, and as a Zigbee-to-internet gateway, and have the notion of using some flavor of OLinuXino as the brains of a line of programmable test equipment, In My Copious Free Time.