Technobabble

After sitting on the sidelines of the Raspberry Pi revolution for a few months, I recently picked up a model B from Newark . (There were a 100 units in stock a few days ago but as of this time, they are showing 0 in stock.) I wanted to complete the accessory setup with minimal wires and maximum portability. Newark offers a host of suggestions for each accessory but I decided to get parts separately. Here's the setup I chose: SD Card: An old Patriot 4GB SDHC card but Fry's has a Samsung 8GB micro SDHC card (with the SD adapter) for $4.99. OS: Raspbian “wheezy” available from the Raspberry Pi downloads page . Keyboard/Mouse: The cheapest wireless keyboard/mouse combination at Fry's which happened to be an iConcepts 2.4GHz Wireless Keyboard and Optical Mouse for $14.99. The dongle that connects to USB is tiny! Wi-Fi: I decided to skip the wired interface and instead got the Patriot Mini Wireless-N USB Wi-Fi adapter for $14.99 at Fry's. The adapter is quite small (...

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized $25-$35 ARM GNU/Linux computer that can be plugged into a TV and a keyboard. Here's a picture of the connectors on the device. The device is stil under development but here's a rendering fo what it will look like. Should be an interesting alternative to Arduinos but make take a while before it has a good community around it. There's already a lot of interest and activity on the forums . Looking forward to being able to purchase it.

I've been using Gentoo since early 2003 and have generally been very regular (almost daily, at least weekly) with system updates using emerge . There was a period of time though when the system was on KDE 3.x and I didn't do any updates for several months. Eventually it took me a lot of effort to resolve dependencies and fix the blocked packages to go up to KDE 4.1. Being an old machine, I didn't do much on that system for the past 5 months. Now it seems like it's going to be very very difficult to any updates. Running emerge -av kde-meta:4.3 give me a huge number of conflicts and blocked package: Total: 290 packages (26 upgrades, 59 new, 205 in new slots, 228 uninstalls), Size of downloads: 556,992 kB Conflict: 272 blocks (12 unsatisfied) ('installed', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.0', 'nomerge') pulled in by ~x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.0 required by ('installed', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-4.5.0', 'nomerge') (...

Adobe has detailed instructions on setting up AIR on 64-bit Linux systems . However they are missing the final step on actual installation of AIR applications. They put a rather unwieldy program under /usr/bin called "Adobe AIR Application Installer". Running this from the command line against any .air file produces this error message: unexpected error: ArgumentError: Error #2004 with no other explanation. Turns out that just running the installer ("Adobe AIR Application Installer") opens a GUI where one can select the .air file and then the installation goes through without problems. Perhaps the command line interface expects arguments in some undocumented syntax.

I've been trying to get the latest version of Amarok to build on Gentoo . This in turn requires PyQt4-4.4 but that ebuild fails with this error on pluginloader.cpp: pluginloader.cpp: In static member function 'static PyObject* PyCustomWidgets::getModuleAttr(const char*, const char*)': pluginloader.cpp:284: error: invalid conversion from 'const char*' to 'char*' pluginloader.cpp:284: error: initializing argument 1 of 'PyObject* PyImport_ImportModule(char*)' pluginloader.cpp:296: error: invalid conversion from 'const char*' to 'char*' pluginloader.cpp:296: error: initializing argument 2 of 'PyObject* PyObject_GetAttrString(PyObject*, char*)' make[1]: *** [pluginloader.o] Error 1 make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs.... make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/dev-python/PyQt4-4.4/work/PyQt-x11-gpl-4.4/designer' make: *** [all] Error 2 There's some discussion of this issue on the forums which le...