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Re: [LUG] meeting 14th April

 

On Sat, 31 Mar 2012, Roland Tarver wrote:

On 23/03/12 07:38, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Thu, 22 Mar 2012, paul sutton wrote:

Hi

Dropped in to the shoreline and booked the our meeting for the 14th
April 2012. No other events on so we don't need to be out early.

I can't make it again as I am at rugby, but if people can give a show
of hands it helps those who are going.

I should be there - got my BASIC talking to Arduino via USB (even from
the Raspberry Pi QEMU emulator too!)

If you're interested in the RPi, I put up a bit of a blog on getting the
Debian image going under QEMU on
http://drogon.net/blog/2012/03/raspberry-pi-in-qemu-debian/

Hi Paul

I am not working (for once! lol); So I also hope to be there.

Will look forward to seeing it Gordon :-)

See it now Roly... Open up your laptop and turn it on. There. You have something that has 100% of the functionality of a R-Pi. Faster too. Easier to use as it has a built-in keyboard, mouse and screen. Job done.

So, I have decided that other than as a pure academic exercise, there's really not point in actually bothering with QEMU, etc. to get an emulated Raspberry Pi going. Yes, it works, but why do I want to run Debian inside an ARM emulator inside my Debian workstation. It's just another Debian Linux (slow, but just another Debian Linux!)

I think the main point that a lot of people are missing is that the R-Pi is nothing more than just another Linux box. Sure, it's small, low power (there are lower powered Linux systems though), but anyone who thinks it's something else is seriously deluded - it's just another Linux box.

So I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by it all too - why should schools buy this, when for free, they can stick a CD into one of the 100's of existing PCs that they have and run Linux on a system that won't need a keyboard, HDMI monitor, USB hub, fiddly little power supply and so on.

The R-Pi may be a solution, but I'm not sure what to.

Oh, it has on-board GPIO - great, but the reality is that its no more than a standard PCs bi-directional printer port.

So don't get mw wrong - it's a great little product and I'm still on the waiting lists for it, and still feel very enthusiastic about it, and can think of many uses (other than the obvious geek one of as a "set top box"/media player) but I really feel that if you want to get computer studies/programming back into school, then the schools already have all the kit they need - apart from the teachers to teach it, and maybe that's the real area we need to concentrate on...

This man has the right idea: http://about.me/alanodonohoe
And this woman: http://www.sueblack.co.uk/ via this site: http://drblack.posterous.com/the-foundation and there are others.

Even Microsoft - who're pushing their new embedded .net stuff based on the Gadgetter platform (ARM based, lots of IO, "polished") - and I understand that MS is also helping to re-write the new computing for schools syllabus too - looks like we lost out there...

So work on getting the teachers involved - they already have the kit!

Gordon

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