Raspberry Pi

[james147]

So anyone else own a raspberry pi? And what are you currently using it for? Or do you have any interesting ideas you want to see someone try out?

I am currently running OpenELEC on my first one very successfully, have it linked up to my server and can stream all my videos and TV shows to my TV in a very nice interface (it even fetches imdb info about the movies!!). Overall makes a great media front end for those of you who actually watch TV/movies you can read about how I set this project up on my blog.

My second one I have been using for my third year project at uni, I have added a few modifications to it for debugging purposes and it currently looks like this

I just got my third one (a rev2 with 512 mb of ram) technically this is the one that is meant to be for my third year project, but I have other plans for it I currently have a clean install of archlinuxarm on it and noticed that it contains kde in the repos. So I am going to be spending the next few hours seeing how well kde works on the raspberry pi (I prefer the archlinuxarm over raspbian as I am more familiar with it and find it easier to work with but either way, this is more about kde).

[whatthefunk]

Interesting. I dont own one and dont plan on buying one, but they seem good for playing around with. Dont think youll have much luck running KDE on 512 mb ram though

[james147]

Interesting. I dont own one and dont plan on buying one, but they seem good for playing around with. Dont think youll have much luck running KDE on 512 mb ram though

Maby not like I am use to on my desktop:

total                    used       free     shared    buffers     cachedMem:
18060                    9236       8824          0          0       3945
-/+ buffers/cache:       5289      12770
Swap:                       0          0          0

But it should at least run with 512 especially if I optimise the settings allot.

Edit: actually it does not have access to the full 512 as some of it is used for the gpu... though atm it seems to be setup with over 400 available to the os, I might need to make this less if the gpu needs more.

[james147]

it is taking forever to login, mostly cpu bound,, going to need to overclock the pi i think.

It it also about to run out of memory, 413/436 and I didn't add any swap space

Edit: ...and... plasma-desktop was killed
But it is still going - o crap the indexer started :S

[whatthefunk]

Yeah, KDE probably isnt going to be so great. LXDE would work well though. Used to use that on a laptop with 256 mb ram and it worked fine.

[james147]

Yeah, KDE probably isnt going to be so great. LXDE would work well though. Used to use that on a laptop with 256 mb ram and it worked fine.

Not looking for great, looking for workable... I just want to see if it is possible...

Unfortunately I fried my image (corrupted file-system) so i am going to have to start from scratch. Though i did get it up to 1050mhz when I overclocked it

[NickStone]

I'd replace KDE with Razor-qt if you want a qt based desktop. Razor-qt is KDEs' smaller brother. Well actually it's not, as it's not developed by the KDE team.

[james147]

Didn't quite like razor-qt the last time I tried it, but that was a while ago... anyway, that is not the point, I just want to see if you can run kde on the pi

[james147]

Just finished reinstalling everything, it is starting much quicker now and hopefully plasma-desktop wont die now I have swap space enabled

Edit: Wow, plasma-desktop's start up process is very cpu heavy :s

[SteveRiley]

Nice job on the construction there, James.

Are you running KDE under Arch Linux for ARM, or did you get Ubuntu to boot? Numerous folk at UDS-R reported that Ubuntu wouldn't run on the Pi.

[james147]

Nice job on the construction there, James.

Are you running KDE under Arch Linux for ARM, or did you get Ubuntu to boot? Numerous folk at UDS-R reported that Ubuntu wouldn't run on the Pi.

Using archlinuxarm since it is a supported image and has kde in its repos..

Unfortunately I could not get plasma-desktop to run before I had to go out, though I did manage to get kwin and konsole running (although a bit slow... but I think that is because I need to increase the gpu ram)

Plasma-desktop just uses 100% cpu and slowly fills up my ram and swap for about 10 mins before crashing

Might try plasma-netbook now to see if that is any better... or plasma-active if it is available in the repos.

[vinnywright]

Using archlinuxarm since it is a supported image and has kde in its repos..

Unfortunately I could not get plasma-desktop to run before I had to go out, though I did manage to get kwin and konsole running (although a bit slow... but I think that is because I need to increase the gpu ram)

Plasma-desktop just uses 100% cpu and slowly fills up my ram and swap for about 10 mins before crashing

Might try plasma-netbook now to see if that is any better... or plasma-active if it is available in the repos.

did you try disabling unneeded services before starting the GUI ,,,,,,, file indexing come's to mind .

VINNY

[james147]

did you try disabling unneeded services before starting the GUI ,,,,,,, file indexing come's to mind .

VINNY

Not before trying startkde, but after that I change my .xinitrc to

exec konsole &
exec kwin

Which started fine, I then tried launching plasma-desktop and it failed as I mentioned.

So indexing is not being started at all. Note: I also ran system settings to disable the unneeded stuff anyway.

Also, from what I could tell after my first attempt was that nepomuk was only started after plasma-desktop was killed (when i tried startkde).

[NickStone]

Would this be of interest to you?