Raspberry Pi#

A new gadget, see http://www.raspberrypi.org.

Installation , operation.#

Make sure you have a micro USB power supply that offers enough current (at least 700 mA) and good voltage. Use a voltmeter in case of doubt.
I had a 2 GB SD Card (the absolute minimum), and installed the default Raspbian “wheezy” on it, see http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.
After downloading and verifying the SHA1, you can unzip it and also check the partitions in it :

metskem@athena ~/Downloads $ ls -l 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img 
-rw-r--r-- 1 metskem metskem 1939865600 Jan  4 20:52 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img
metskem@athena ~/Downloads $ file 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img 
metskem@athena ~/Downloads $ sudo dd if=2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
462+1 records in
462+1 records out
1939865600 bytes (1.9 GB) copied, 243.748 s, 8.0 MB/s
metskem@athena ~/Downloads $

Stick the network cable in, and stick the power cable in.
You should see the red LED (PWR) see lighting up, and also after a few seconds all (4) other green and yellow LEDs.
If not, either your power supply is insufficient or your SD card is not properly formatted with the right 2 partitions (that was the case with me the first time).

After booting up the first challenge is to find out the IP address it got (DHCP), so I wrote a small shell script the iterates over all 25 addresses in the range and tries to ssh pi@${address} .

After first login (user pi password raspberry), you are advised to run the sudo raspi-config script. I did that to

  • Expand root partition to fill SD card
  • set the Timezone
  • set the Locale
  • run an update (apt-get)

Some "screenshots"#

metskem@athena ~/Downloads $ ssh pi@10.0.0.171
Linux raspberrypi 3.2.27+ #250 PREEMPT Thu Oct 18 19:03:02 BST 2012 armv6l

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Sat Jan  5 14:59:34 2013 from 10.0.0.164
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs          1.8G  1.5G  238M  86% /
/dev/root       1.8G  1.5G  238M  86% /
devtmpfs        220M     0  220M   0% /dev
tmpfs            44M  200K   44M   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            88M     0   88M   0% /run/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p1   56M   17M   40M  30% /boot
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 1967 MB, 1967128576 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 60032 cylinders, total 3842048 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00017b69

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mmcblk0p1            8192      122879       57344    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2          122880     3842047     1859584   83  Linux
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor	: ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS	: 697.95
Features	: swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xb76
CPU revision	: 7

Hardware	: BCM2708
Revision	: 000e
Serial		: 0000000095619558
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 3.2.27+ #250 PREEMPT Thu Oct 18 19:03:02 BST 2012 armv6l GNU/Linux
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ 

Reboot after plugging in USB stick#

Because I only had a 2GB SD Card (I already ordered a 16GB class 10 card, next week in) and want to put more stuff on it, I inserted an extra USB stick in, this immediately made 4 of 5 LEDs go out. I suspect this required a short peak of current making the voltage reduce too much. It did automatically reboot and was back up in about 30 seconds.

Performance#

The performance of the thing is (as expected) not as we are used to with our Intel boxes. Also having a slow SD card makes the thing even slower. If you use top you see a lot of IOWAIT.

Installed stuff#

  • locate
  • vim
  • default-jre-headless (and that just fitted on the SD card, only 88MB free)

JSPWiki#

The goal is to see how JSPWiki runs on it.
We need a container first, so unzipped the latest tomcat (7.0.34) to /mnt/sda1/apache-tomcat-7.0.34.
The created the webapps/wiki directory and unzipped the latest (2.9.1-svn-11) and tweaked jspwiki.properties (baseURL and pageDir and attachmentDIR).

Firing up the stuff, takes a loooong time, see attached jspwiki.log(info), but it just works (as expected :-) )

Created an extra DNS alias for my domain and added some proxy statements to my main host, the wiki is now accessible at http://raspberrypi.computerhok.nl/wiki

Performance tomcat / JSPWiki#

See for details the logfile(info), but some performance related messages:

INFO: Server startup in 103644 ms

2013-01-05 16:48:29,964 [JSPWiki Lucene Indexer] INFO org.apache.wiki.search.LuceneSearchProvider  - Full Lucene index finished in 10067 milliseconds.

You also notice the first time you get to the wiki and all JSP's have to be compiled, that takes several minutes !