So I got my first one earlier this week. I have previously not been very interested, but they had the B+ model at a store nearby, as well as proper microSD card and a nice case for it too. I spent a day considering what distro to put on it, and ended up deciding on Slackware 14.1. Currently I have not really decided what to do with it, I've just been playing around, even running a full desktop through tigervnc although I quickly discovered that the B+ is not ideally suited for running graphical applications. For now I have not really decided on a specific use scenario, I'm just using it to learn more about Slackware as well as other things I've never tried out before, like running a full desktop through a vncserver through ssh.
Congrats! I'm looking forward to picking an ODROID-C1 myself. Just a note of caution, you might end up compiling packages with Slackware, and compilation time is so... dreadfully slow! Oh, since you are an Arch user there's also Arch Linux ARM.
I know about Arch Arm, but I wanted to spend some time with Slackware which is why I went for it. I am well aware the compilation times might be slow in the Raspberry Pi, but Slackware does come with most stuff you would need as long as you are comfortable working without a graphical environment. Once I get some proper ideas what I might do with these then I will probably get a much more powerful device. But for now it is a learning experience, and a lot of fun too.
Well, just some ideas. I also thought of using it for VNC as well as these: - Cross-compiling your code in ARM devices, pretty neat if you are a programmer. I didn't think about it until a reddit user said he bought an ARM device like Pi to port his code. - Media center. Honestly this IS the feature I'm interested in mostly. With a wireless keyboard mouse it should be pretty neat. (preferably? I just want a normal remote controller...). Plug your device to your tv, browse/watch anything. - file server (it shouldn't interfere with the media center but... who knows) - http server with nginx - set up other type of servers (mail, database, etc) - use it to synchronize your backups to the cloud with rsync if you have multiple devices to backup. Not sure how SAMBA would play along though. I'm incredibly unlucky with SAMBA.
Awesome Daniel! I can't believe it was in a retail store. I've been wanting one for a long time.... and now I'm eyeing the ODROID as well. I don't really have a specific use for it besides media center on my TV. If there was an ARM version of Steam, I would stream my games from a desktop to my TV with it
I have not decided on anything specific yet, so currently I have not done more than just compile a simple program I made with GTK to check that it compiles and runs on the Pi. I was thinking about using it for backups. I can connect the external hard drives to it, and share the drives over Samba for backup.
That is a really good idea. A dedicated network computer just for backing up. Should work great. So the backup would access all of your local machines and copy the files over the network?
I'll definitely set this up when I have the time. The external hard drives connected to the Pi and accessible only on my local network through Samba. I could even automate this, make a script that checks every sunday or so for the availability of the external drive over Samba. If it is available (the Pi is running) then it will mount it and do the backup using rsync. It would also allow for much easier access to my external drives. So that's my first little project with this. I will definitely not stop there, but it is definitely something that would make things a lot more convenient for me.
I think its a great idea. A little portable backup workstation. Its much better than a phone or touchscreen device.
