Pi - Addendum

Just a quick update today.

We're working on Yet Another Ridiculously Boring RFP at the office, so I had enough time to dick around with some background tasks for the RasPi. Here are some tidbits that I didn't know off-hand, but do now:

SD Class Not a Big Deal

I thought I was being badass getting the Class 10s, but it turns out not to matter very much. Raspbian will boot to prompt in ~20 seconds from a Class 10 card, and ~24 from a Class 4. There is a difference, and some things might be a bit snappier from the Class 10, but overall I probably would have opted to save my money had I known how big the actual difference is.

HD Video Out-of-the-box

Yup. I spent a bit of time poking at mplayer settings before I realized that you can actually play your awesome videos directly from the Raspbian image. You need to set your memory split to either of the two highest options favoring the video unit by running raspi-config, selecting the setting, then restarting. Then, just oxmplayer /path/to/your/file/here.mp4. And there; glorious, full playback rate HD is yours. The only problem this raises for me is re-writing my media center webapp, since I'll need to control something other than mplayer.

No GHCi For You!

You can still install Hugs and play around that way, but GHCi categorically does not work on ARM yet. Which is kind of sad, because I was looking forward to busting it out. I'm not entirely sure how compatible Hugs and GHCi are, but I'm betting the answer is "Not 100% compatible". I may or may not be appraising you of the diffs shortly.

Yes Clojure For You!

This one sort of boggles my mind. Yes, you can apt-get install leiningen on a Raspberry Pi, and yes this lets you then lein repl. No, it's not very fast, it takes longer for the JVM to start up than it does for the RasPi to boot, and there's a visible delay when evaluating anything more complex than basic arithmetic, but goddamit it's there.

Really, anything I've wanted to do so far was fully available to me. I spent lunch today installing Emacs, then running SLIME with clisp and poking around. What I haven't done is customize my environment yet, just installed the components that would allow me to do so. Next order of business is getting all my various .emacs/.emacs.d settings imported, and making sure everything plays nicely.

With any luck, my next blog post will be coming from a computer smaller than my phone.