Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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3 Replies to “I got my Raspberry Pi today”
What are ya gonna do with yours? I’ve got kiwix-serve running off a ZIM file to provide a partial local mirror of Wikipedia plus httrack doing some caching of certain sites in case of infrastructure failure. MediaTomb is also running to serve up content. Having the UPS alarm screaming at me at weird times of night reminds me of how rickety my local infrastructure is.
I did try running RaspXBMC but could not configure it to my liking and got frustrated with it. MediaTomb on the back-end is working out nicer than RaspXBMC on the front-end.
Right now the plan is just to get it running. I got it more to play with and demo to libraries than to do something particular with it. (I’d love to use it as a media server but that whole lack-of-blu-ray-playing thing pretty much rules out that plan.)
The best thing to do is to start with a large SD card (preferably 16-32 gigabytes) and the latest image of Raspbian. Raspbian, like Ubuntu, is based on a Debian base. It is a little stripped down compared to an Ubuntu install but it works well. Make sure you pick up a good USB hub, an okay HDMI cable, a wall power supply to push 5 volts to the microUSB power port, and either an appropriate length of Cat5 or a WiFi USB adapter. If you get the WiFi USB adapter you’ll need to install the package “firmware-linux” as it isn’t installed by default but will be needed to play nice with WiFi USB adapters in general.
Blake’s got my current direct contact details if you want to talk about things further. I’ve been playing with ARM-based boards now for a while so some conundrums have come up for me.
What are ya gonna do with yours? I’ve got kiwix-serve running off a ZIM file to provide a partial local mirror of Wikipedia plus httrack doing some caching of certain sites in case of infrastructure failure. MediaTomb is also running to serve up content. Having the UPS alarm screaming at me at weird times of night reminds me of how rickety my local infrastructure is.
I did try running RaspXBMC but could not configure it to my liking and got frustrated with it. MediaTomb on the back-end is working out nicer than RaspXBMC on the front-end.
Right now the plan is just to get it running. I got it more to play with and demo to libraries than to do something particular with it. (I’d love to use it as a media server but that whole lack-of-blu-ray-playing thing pretty much rules out that plan.)
The best thing to do is to start with a large SD card (preferably 16-32 gigabytes) and the latest image of Raspbian. Raspbian, like Ubuntu, is based on a Debian base. It is a little stripped down compared to an Ubuntu install but it works well. Make sure you pick up a good USB hub, an okay HDMI cable, a wall power supply to push 5 volts to the microUSB power port, and either an appropriate length of Cat5 or a WiFi USB adapter. If you get the WiFi USB adapter you’ll need to install the package “firmware-linux” as it isn’t installed by default but will be needed to play nice with WiFi USB adapters in general.
Blake’s got my current direct contact details if you want to talk about things further. I’ve been playing with ARM-based boards now for a while so some conundrums have come up for me.