Time for Pi

[Nicholas]

Hi Evan,

If you live in Toronto, I highly recommend buying your Raspberry Pi at
Creatron, at College & Spadina.  It'll cost you $5-10 more than ordering
from a distributor, but it's worth it to not have to deal with shipping
(which will cost you anyway).  Also: instant gratification!

If you want to run your Pi as a media system, you should look into
buying Codec licenses from raspberrypi.org -- this will activate the
hardware video decoding acceleration for smooth video.  Also, try to use
the audio-over-HDMI capability for a home theatre system -- the
audio-out jack doesn't have much in the way of an amplifier on that
circuit, so if you use it instead of HDMI-audio you may need a pre-amp.

As for cases, we at Hacklab.to have been laser-cutting cases out of
acrylic, using a design created by AdaFruit.  Scott Sullivan has been
awesome with this, and has produced most of the cases that are now
adorning RP's around the lab.  If you drop him a line (scott-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org),
assuming he has some available he might be willing to part with a case
or two for a small sum to cover his time/cost, or a couple of beers.
Scott offered to cut a case for me when I bought an RP and it turned out
*great*, so hopefully he still produces them.

There are also commercial cases available from lots of hobby electronics
places (including Creatron), so you should hunt around.  I like the
AdaFruit case best, but the Pibow (
http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pibow ) is a pretty gorgeous second
choice.

With regards to KDE... eh, maybe.  I kind of doubt it.  Mine runs a
lightweight window manager and kind of strains to keep up with anything
that needs heavy computing power, or is graphics intensive.  But you
should experiment and find out!  Maybe someone has already proved me
wrong?  Worst case scenario is that you yank out the SD card and dd a
new Raspbian image to it.

Which reminds me -- you'll want an SD card.  I got a high speed Phillips
16GB SD card from Fortune Computers (also at College & Spadina) for $10.
 It does a pretty good job.

--Nicholas



On 18/05/13 12:40 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> OK, you've convinced me. I wanna get a Raspberry Pi. Maybe more than
> one. Probably to play around with, but maybe ultimately as a home
> theatre client running Rasplex.
> 
> Now ... about procurement...
> 
> The two sites that are the direct sellers -- Newark and Allied -- both
> appear to make you create an account before they'll tell you shipping
> costs. What are they? Is one suppier clearly better than the other? Is
> there any clear advantage to multiple people pooling into one order?
> 
> (I'm looking to get a Model B)
> 
> Is the system fast enough to run KDE?
> 
> And finally ... what are people doing for cases?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -- 
> Evan Leibovitch
> Toronto Canada
> 
>     Em: evan at telly dot org
>     Sk: evanleibovitch
>     Tw: el56
> 
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