[clue] Buying pi.

David L. Anselmi anselmi at anselmi.us
Mon Feb 25 20:03:47 MST 2013


David L. Anselmi wrote:
> I think I'm going to get a Raspberry Pi or two, to try out as a cheap, low power server.

So the Pis came 2 weeks ago.  USB cables (for power) and the wrong power supply came last week.  The 
SD cards came today (and I don't have to wait for a power supply because for now the old server can 
provide).  So I got it running tonight.

I thought I'd get a USB hard drive but the old server is using < 8GB of it's 30GB so I just got an 
8GB SD card.  They're cheap enough that I don't care if it wears out.

I had booted the image in qemu but it wouldn't mount /proc (not sure why, init was set up to) so I 
didn't fool with it.

Now /var/lib/dpkg/status is full of nulls, so dpkg doesn't work, so the config script doesn't all 
work.  The image has a working status file so I copied it over.  Wonder why that happened?

I expect other glitches but none that will be insurmountable.  It will take a while to remove the 
Raspbian cruft and copy the config over from the old server.

It's funny to be going from i386 to ARM.  This server started as an Alpha way back so it's old hat 
to use a different boot loader etc.  When it outgrew the Alpha, old i386 hardware was the easiest to 
find, and now we can get something small and quiet and ARM.

BTW, I really like the case that came from MCM.  The Pi snaps into the bottom and the top snaps over 
the top, very snug.  It doesn't provide access to the GPIO header but I don't need that now.  If I 
did I'd probably leave the top off.  It has rubber feet, sockets to hang it from screws on a wall, 
and it looks like I can slide a zip-tie through the vent slots on the bottom to attach it to most 
anything else.

Dave


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