My Raspberry Pi had been behaving itself on the ‘hardware’ side since I took possession of it, weeks ago. After reading about limitations of USB connectivity, I obtained a reasonably-priced powered USB hub, with the intention (not surprisingly!) of connecting more things – including testing the possibility of USB sound.. So…. I connected the USB hub, and … Continue reading →
Not Linux-related this time… I should confess that I actually do use Windows 7 frequently, for HD Video processing and editing using Sony Vegas Pro and Cineform (on a stand-alone system), and for colour slide restoration using Photoshop (Win7 on VMware, on Linux).. The reason is that – simply – there is no equivalent quality software available … Continue reading →
I had noticed that the OpenELEC XBMC build for the Raspberry Pi included a 3.1.10 kernel, so decided to ‘update’ my Fedora 17 card to this, using the OpenELEC kernel source, cross-compiled.. So.. Now running Fedora 17 on a 3.1.10 kernel: $ uname -a Linux rgpi 3.1.10 #1 Tue May 8 13:41:06 BST 2012 armv6l armv6l armv6l … Continue reading →
Some initial experiences with video playback, using the OpenELEC XBMC installation on the Raspberry Pi…. Recorded HD TV Programmes (m2t.. UK.. BBC HD etc..) – playback bad. Jerky and stop/start. This is not a great surprise, as the format is (to put it politely..) a bit of a hybrid sound / video combination.. 720p camera recordings (mpeg4), … Continue reading →
I decided to revert to the cross-compile option, which was a) much, much faster to compile! and b) completed successfully.. Then I followed the instructions to install the results on an 8GB SD Card… It is worth mentioning, that this is a case where RTFM is absolutely required, as the whole process is different from what you … Continue reading →
The Raspberry Pi is still chugging away, compiling the entire OpenELEC XBMC stack… Hopefully – as absolutely everything is compiled from source – the performance will be (relatively) good… After running for over 3 days, the compilation failed when compiling /lib/libsquish/libsquish-native.so: g++: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-msse2’ This may possibly be an error caused by Fedora … Continue reading →
Now that I have Fedora 17 running OK, I will try the XBMC stuff… There doesn’t seem to be a complete ‘image’ available yet, so I have got the git repository code from OpenELEC, and (just for fun) am actually compiling it all on the Pi.. Seems to be (roughly) as quick to compile as an old … Continue reading →
After applying the SD Card disk formatting and ‘optimisation’ mentioned previously, I decided to attempt to bring the version of Fedora (14) up to date.. The Fedora 17 Pi ‘respin’ is due sometime in May, but I decided – based on my experiences with Fedora 17 on the Dreamplug – to try to ‘hack’ F17 from the … Continue reading →
Despite previous ‘tweaks’, I have been experiencing continuing problems with SD Card Linux performance, and with the unreliable operations of yum / rpm, with associated db corruption, when they have to be ‘killed’ after hanging.. Based on two excellent pieces of prior research: http://blogofterje.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/optimizing-fs-on-sd-card/ and http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/projects-and-collaboration-general/optimizing-linux-for-flash-memory – I will be having a stimulating (!) time performing formatting … Continue reading →
I had intended to persevere with the Fedora 14 ‘respin’, despite it being (correctly, IMHO..) described as ‘a bit buggy’.. Performance was improved with the newer 3.1.9+ kernel image, without the debug messages, but overall the response was still very sluggish.. I selected XFCE as the UI, as I had used this – successfully – with Fedora … Continue reading →