LearnByDoingIT

  • From the FutureJournalism Project

     

    Raspberry PI Foundation, the UK-based non-profit, has begun production on its $35 Linux computer. It’s about the size of a credit card and will ship as an open board like that pictured above.

    For display, users can plug it into existing monitors or televisions. USB connections are available for keyboard and mouse.

    The Foundation’s goal is to put inexpensive computers into the hands of young people to hack upon.

    The backstory comes via Raspberry Pi:

    The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton was lecturing and working in admissions at Cambridge University. Eben had noticed a distinct drop in the skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year when he came to interview them. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant now had experience only with web design, and sometimes not even with that. Fewer people were applying to the course every year. Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers…

    …There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment.

    Specs (via the Raspberry Pi FAQ):

    • Debian, Fedora and ArchLinux will be supported from the start.
    • 256 MB RAM, 700Mhz ARM11 CPU, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s
    • Size 85.60mm x 53.98mm x 17mm. It weighs 45g.
    • Composite and HDMI out on the board. There is no VGA support, but adaptors are available.

    Perhaps a great little machine to get if you’re learning to code by following along with CodeAcademy’s Code Year.

  • I was upgrading to Fedora 16 on my Dell Dimension E520, originally loaded with XP, and all manners of problems occurred with Grub2.  The machine is set to dual boot Linux and Windows XP and has worked fine in this capacity while testing and using a number of Linux distributions including Fedora 14 and Fedora 15.

    After upgrading, it began by requiring that grub2-install needed to be run everytime I rebooted.  By the time I really had a chance to look at it, updates rendered it foobar.

    The error contained  your core.img is unusually large, it won’t fit in the embedding area and is readily found here.

    The Dell has a RAID controller and although the disk is not using it, Bugzilla #737508 applies.  Essentially Grub2’s core image exceeds the 32KiB partition that was originally created.  Maddening as it is trivialized in the bug report as unlikely to happen, although if you haven’t repartitioned the entire disk to get a more popular 1MiB BIOS boot partition, it will happen.  The fix is straightforward, reduce the size of the following partition without sliding it forward, GParted on SystemRescueCD worked fine,  and a larger BIOS boot partition will be allowed.  Grub2 installs with no issues

    NOTE: if you delete the next partition, and Windows follows it, you will not be able to boot Windows, nor load the Recovery CD, the boot.ini references a partition table that no longer matches and Windows drops the blue screen of death from a CD boot.  The confusing %windows%/system32.hal.dll errors is provided off a hard disk boot.  Simply add back a small EXT2 partition (assuming what you found was the small VFAT partition DELL installs with the machine) which has a smaller allowed size and everything will run just great.

  • THE beauty of Twitter, the popular microblogging service, is that users have to keep it short: messages can only be 140 characters long. But companies that mine the stream of tweets for marketing and other purposes get much more information. Below is a map of a tweet including all its metadata. The map was published by Raffi Krikorian, a developer at Twitter. It is 18 months old, but it is safe to say that the amount of metadata attached to a tweet has not decreased since.
    map-of-a-tweet

  • What devices in my house, besides computers and servers, use Linux?

    Series 2 Tivo

    Of course my

    Motorola Droid2

    And my

    Kindle Fire

  • Arch Linux – “It is what you make it”

    For a brief overview of Arch Linux, an elegantly simple and thoroughly technically complex distribution, read this article.

    Many Linux distributions have taken the path of easy GUI-based installation, in order to appeal to a broader mix of users. But not Arch Linux, which emphasises simplicity of technical complexity over general usability. Richard Hillesley explains.

    Among the myriad of differences between Arch and say, Ubuntu or Fedora is the system of rolling releases it uses instead of version numbers.  Is the point to have a productive worksation, or the latest release?

    As I am installing in on a kitchen machine though, I can’t help but ponder using ArchBang for a quick start.  I doubt I will though, I always like the confidence that comes with installing Arch.