Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Raspberry Pi is showing up in all kinds of places. Last time we brought you 15 accessories for the Raspberry Pi, and now we're going to show you some of the cool projects these things are being used for. Keep reading for examples of the Raspberry Pi in the kitchen, at the bank, in your phone, feeding your dog, giving brains to R2D2, and more!



Raspberry Pi LED display board
Jeroen Domburg, known online as "Sprite," was given a very interesting piece of hardware to bring back to life: a dual-color 224x48 LED display board that had previously been used to display information for some kind of transportation system. In a rare occurrence, he was also given all the necessary power supplies and the industrial computer to drive it.
Right in the middle of Jeroen's project documentation you'll get a glimpse into the art of computer hacking. The computer boots up, gives him the hardware specs, then goes to a blank screen. His task was to find out how to get access to this computer and gain full control over the network in a few minutes using publicly available tools.
Once he had the display working like it was originally intended, he had to take it a step further. This is where the Raspberry Pi comes in. With its power, network access, and gpio pins, it was a perfect fit to drive the display. Jeroen loaded a linux distrubution and video client on the board and got the results you see above. Note that the flickering is due to the refresh rate of the screen and the refresh rate of the camera overlapping -- it doesn't have this issue with the naked eye.




Thursday, October 17, 2013

http://www.linuxmint.com/

Another highly rated Linux distribution is Linux Mint, now at version 15. Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. It also adds a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, and a web-based package installation interface. Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories. Linux Mint is the top rated distribution on Distrowatch.com
PCLinuxOS

This is my all-time favorite Linux distribution. Excellent administration tools, and easy for even the first time Linux user. Outstanding work by my friend Mr. Bill Reynolds. He has announced the release of PCLinuxOS 2013.10, the latest updates for the project's "KDE", "MiniMe" and "LXDE" editions: "PCLinuxOS KDE 2013.10 (32/64-bit) is now available for download. With respect to the previous KDE editions these ISO images have the following changes/additions: Linux kernel 3.4.64. KDE 2013.10 has all the additions from MiniME and was built to provide a general-purpose KDE desktop computing environment. The DVD includes popular tools for office, audio, video, graphics, and Internet applications (LibreOffice 4.1.2, GIMP, Skype, Dropbox, VirtualBox, etc.) as well as additional drivers and tools to set up your hardware (graphic card, network, printer, scanner, etc.).
Read the release announcement(the "LXDE" edition was announced in a separate post) for more information and screenshots. 
Download links:pclinuxos64-kde-2013.10.iso (1,575MB, MD5), 
pclinuxos64-kde-minime-2013.10.iso (631MB, MD5), 
pclinuxos64-lxde-2013.10.iso (698MB, MD5).