Friday, June 29, 2012

KDE on the Raspberry Pi

As you may know, there is no Kubuntu for Raspberry, due to the incompatibility of Kubuntu ARM version with the little computer. I wanted to create an image for raspberry most similar as possible to Kubuntu, so I basically took the original Debian release and add some packages to have the entire Plasma Desktop. The result is quite nice, I think, and the system itself uses about 100-110 MB of the total RAM (there is also some swap on the card image). It's also quite speddy: the only problem could be that when you launch a new program, for some seconds the CPU load is 100%. You just need to wait a little and then eveything returns fine. The image can be downloaded from this link:
http://www.zorbaproject.org/raspberry/debian-raspberry-kde.img
and you can dd it on a 4GB SD card with the command:
dd bs=1M if=~/debian-raspberry-kde.img of=/dev/sdd
if your SD card is /dev/sdd, obiously.

Just a note: the username is "pi" and the password is "raspberry".

Have fun hacking with Raspberry and KDE.

EDIT: Now with screenshots:





I decided to shot photos with a camera, because it shows that there is no "trick" and what you are seeing is really KDE on a RaspberryPi.
If you want to look at other shots, here they are: https://picasaweb.google.com/109718345247929494628/KDEOnRaspberryPi

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Raspberry Pis have arrived

Just writing to say that my RaspberryPi from Farnell and the one from RS Component have arrived yesterday.


I'm playing with them a little, doing some experiments, and actually they seems quite good, expecially for the price. The official Debian GN/Linux distro runs fast and without troubles. Actually, I'm trying to prepare a Kubuntu version for the RaspberryPi, but it will take some time, I think, to make it work smoothly.

If you want to give a look at them, you will find all the pictures in my gallery:
https://picasaweb.google.com/109718345247929494628/RaspberryPi