Yet Another Developer Blog

Since my last post, although my [fun][geek] evening time was limited, I managed to fix a few issues on my home network, thanks to my Raspberry Pi. First, I made it reachable from the Internet. Nothing difficult there: I already had this setup for my "old" Dell Linux machine. Just a matter of: Assigning a fixed local IP address to the RPI. Configuring a NAT rule on the Internet gateway that maps an external port (e.g. 12345) to the SSH daemon port on the RPI (port 22). Having a small client that registers the Internet gateway external IP address to a free dynamic  DNS service. For that I installed and configured " ddclient " with an account from DynDNS . Cool... How geek, now I can remotely connect to my home network from the Internet. Well, this is needed for later: I want it to be the center and the entry to my home network. Home-automation, security here we go! Since my [fabulous] Internet gateway still refuses to persist DHCP static lease bindings, ...

I will not be using the "Raspberry Pi" as "a common PC"; there are already too many of these at home. And well, for the use-case I am thinking of, it is not needed. So the first step is to make it "headless". For my initial experiment, I took the default Linux distribution " Raspbian wheezy " (16/12/2012); I preferred to start with the "official" distribution (I assume, the most stable and the easiest to begin with).  I made sure I would have at least: A connection to the screen: that meant for me a cable HDMI to DVI. A network connection to my home modem. A USB keyboard. Everything went well, except that the keyboard I used (a Logitech Wireless keyboard K340) did not work out of the box. For some obscure reason, if the USB dongle is connected at boot-time, I don't get the keyboard to work; but, if I unplug and plug again the dongle after the RPI booted, it worked just fine... After that I could finally start. Good ...

Yesterday I finally got my " Raspberry Pi "... and after unpacking it, I couldn't stop being nostalgic: "Wow, what a step my first computer... my good old 8086 ". A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I used to live in France, and I used to have an old 8086 (my first own computer - thanks Dad !). It was a piece of hardware: a huge box, a huge screen... Internally it was a beauty: nothing compared to today's PCs where the cabling is always a big mess, the cases have always issues with dust etc. But, what an evolution when I try to compare it to my new toy. Memory, my precious:  640k of RAM was cool. But sometimes, after booting or running a few programs, there was not enough to run stuff. Optimization was not about "add more memory" or "run garbage collector". I remember, it was about writing the perfect " autoexec.bat " with its " config.sys " and avoid loading unnecessary drivers etc. 10M of hard-disk...