

Raspberry Pi computer review - ahjones
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17857189

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unwind
I didn't know the Pi ships with the Blender Foundation's awesome animated
cartoon _Big Buck Bunny_ (<http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/>) on the SD card.
Cool! It makes me wonder how well it would actually _run_ Blender though, and
if there are ARM binaries available?

The latest builds listing at <http://builder.blender.org/download/> doesn't
include any.

~~~
pmjordan
There are blender packages in the ARM debian repository, so you should be able
to get it to build on Fedora, too. Another issue is whether it'll run: I think
Blender uses OpenGL/GLX for rendering, and I don't know if that works on the
RPi. OpenGL ES 2.0 is supposedly supported by the hardware, but I don't know
if and how that is supported in Linux userspace, particularly as OpenGL ES is
mostly a subset of OpenGL. Software rendering might suffice though.

~~~
burgerbrain
> _"Software rendering might suffice though."_

If I understand correctly, if it's using Mesa it should software render what
it has to and hardware render the rest, without needing to change the program
itself?

~~~
pmjordan
Yes, unless it makes specific demands on the OpenGL implementation which
Mesa's software renderer can't meet. By "suffice" I was mainly thinking of
performance. I don't know if Mesa is optimised for ARMv6 at all, and how
demanding Blender is in this regard.

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tdr
> The website where it was offered for sale crashed

Still can't order in certain countries

And is it me or why didn't they put the links to buy?

<http://www.farnell.com/>

<http://uk.rs-online.com/web/>

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mattmanser
It's the BBC, they're explicitly not allowed to by their charter.

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kmf
This would make an interesting little server if has the processing power for
that. Maybe with a big SD card, it could be a little portable Git server?

~~~
jgoewert
It has more than enough power for home server level tasks.

I was fast, lucky, and able to wake up at 0-dark-30 in the morning to order
and I currently have it running ArchLinux and using 4 USB webcams to detect
motion and lock in to take facial-area screenshots using both Motion and
OpenCV+Python. This weekend, I plan on testing out the Kinect libraries.

I have a 7000maH battery on order from Amazon to be able to make it portable
and easily chargeable which I hope to get 8 hours of off the grid battery life
out of.

If you don't need the video, audio, GPIO, or the long wait time for the
batches to fill current orders, a comparable product at low cost would be the
PogoPlug. <http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/pogoplug-provideov3>

~~~
pm90
This is pretty amazing stuff! Do you have a blog where you post the details?

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alexchamberlain
Only 2 programming languages installed? I doubt it!

~~~
ConstantineXVI
They're the two that make the most sense to expose the most, given their
mission. I'd be surprised if it didn't also have gcc at a minimum.

~~~
alexchamberlain
I'd also be very surprised if gcc wasn't there. I'd like to think people are
taught what pointers are and how they can be used to make data structures.
Educate people about the dangers, but don't be scared!

