The project is known as Raspberry Pi, after a few years of planning and development, Raspberry Pi now have two single board, credit card sized computers fully developed. The first (Model ‘A’) is priced at $25 and features 128MB RAM. For an extra $10 you can get the ‘B’ model, which ships with 256mb RAM and on board ethernet.

Both models use a Broadcom BCM2835 chip. This is basically an ARM11 700mhz CPU but with a dedicated 1080p Dual Core ‘VideoCore’ co-processor built in. This basically means that this tiny little computer is able to playback video at full HD without any problems from its limited memory, due to the on-board video decoder.

So whats the point in it for the average user? Well, there’s a number of great things that can be done with it. Because its so cheap, you could buy 6 of these and it’d work out the same cost as 1 Sheevaplug. 6 Raspberry pie’s all hooked up together in a nice cluster would give you a great, low power linux system to work on. Myself, I’m planning on purchasing a couple of these as soon as they are released. Initially I just want to have a play with them, however I’m quite interested in hooking them up to the TV to use as a UPNP client to stream to the TV, and maybe even as a replacement for the AppleTV assuming I can get an AirPlay based server up and running.

Another great usage would be as a homeserver. The on-board SD card slot supports SDHC (unfortunately not SDXC) cards, so you can theoretically get a 32 or 64 GB card and use it to run a super fast LAMP system, all using just 5v of power via a microUSB plug!

Why not take a look at Raspberry Pi – for $25 its a fantastic project and worth checking out!

When I was out in Florida over Christmas, I bought myself an Acer Aspire One netbook. Basically this little thing has very similar specifications to my Mac Mini which has recently had lots of problems….problems that would be very expensive to fix.

Anyway, I decided I would have a go at getting OS X Leopard running on the Aspire One. I had read that it was possible however without wireless and in some cases sound. Plus I would have to sacrifice the use of the SD expansion port and other media ports. That’s not really something that bothers me though as I use my main computer for anything relating to cameras.

So I installed OS X using Kalyway’s great distro (also I may note that I do own a separate OS X license for this computer) and got everything working except wireless. I found that the Atheros based wireless card in the Aspire wasn’t supported by OS X. So I purchased a broadcom based dell card from eBay for £12 inc P&P. Once that arrived, I fitted it and it worked first time. At the same time I took the opportunity to replace the 512MB RAM module with a 1GB module, taking the system memory up to 1.5GB’s

Overall I’m very happy with the result. I got a great portable laptop / server running the best operating system around for just $349 USD in Walmart!

Unfortunately I cant post any snaps up at the moment as I’m in the middle of moving from Flickr to my own gallery, however will update you once I do have a bunch of images to show off!

The seller kindly sent me a replacement 1GB stick as it looked like one of the RAM slots was faulty. I had been running fine for about 5 months, then last month I did a re-boot after OS X 10.5.5 was released and boom….the mini wouldn’t boot. After spending about 5 days trying to fix it, even trying to reinstall OS X I gave in. It looked like OS X stopped running if there were memory issues.

I installed Ubuntu which worked flawlessly….for 5 days. I’m still running Ubuntu and have to re-boot every 5 or so days as it locks up. Nothing in the logs, it just locks up. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something not right hardware wise and cant be fixed.

I’m going to be looking into replacing it, but cant really afford to splash out on another MacMini. I think I’ll be making a new server using an Intel Atom package. I can still run at 1.6 Ghz and its still a small sized motherboard.

Since the Atom integrated motherboards are fairly cheap, I will be able to spend some money on getting system to boot on a solid state drive. I found that you can get 32GB CF Cards, and a CF to SATA drive for under £50 which is great! You can even get duel CF readers, thus giving you a 64GB solid state drive on the cheap!

So heres my spec plan:

1.6Ghz Intel Atom
2GB DDR2 RAM
2x 32GB CF solid drives (using a SATA -> CF adaptor)
A small case (not much bigger than the MacMini case hopefully)
DVD RW +/-

Since I’m off on holiday soon I cant really afford to build this, however when I’m over in the states, I’ll pop into circuit city, Best Buy and a few other places to see if I can get some of the parts….will be much cheaper than buying here!