Who's been looking at your blog??

While checking out the stats on this blog I noticed that there were some unexpected views from US (80 pageviews), and Germany (2) along with a whopping 156 pageviews from (probably) my classmates in Ireland - hello fellow HDSWTECHers!

I should probably offer an apology to anyone who arrived on this blog expecting some useful insight and  original information about the RPi; this is blogging for blogging sake - I am being graded on it...

So here's my tip: there is plenty of useful, insightful and informative content on the RPi elsewhere, such as the Raspberry Pi site and the excellent tutorials on Raspberry Pi Beginners YouTube channel.

What I have been doing (instead of installing all those packages which would support the Web Technologies course) is putting an XBMC image on another SD card - I suspect a large majority of the Raspberry Pi's have been bought solely for this purpose.

I have been a fan of XBMC for a long time.  When the original Xbox was succeeded by the Xbox360, the price of the original console fell dramatically to the extent that a second-hand console could be had for about €20 (sometimes including a few games).

The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) was an open source project which hacked the Xbox games console and replaced the stock dashboard with a customisable media centre which allowed users to play games, watch video, listen to music and/or view pictures on their television sets.  This is one of the reasons that the NSLU2 I had cut my Linux teeth on was replaced by an old PC which runs Ubuntu Server - the NSLU2 was stretched beyond its capabilities and the user xperience from my couch was slow loading and frequent buffering.

The XBMC project has since left the original console behind, concentrating on HTPC's, jailbroken Apple TV's  and iPads as well as running as as applications in Windows, Mac OS and Linux.  Consequently, they no longer support the original console directly although the community is keeping the releases reasonably up to date although the original hardware struggles with some modern video formats.

The image of choice for now is Raspbmc which  is an XBMC and linux-based OS distribution for Raspberry Pi - the beauty of the RPi is that the Raspbmc OS image can be loaded on a separate SD card (2GB is sufficient) to the Debian image.  This means that the RPi can be very simply booted as a media center which can playback 1080p content, or as a learning tool providing command line or GUI interfaces for learning to program, depending on the SD card being used at any particular time.