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First Impression Of RaspberryPi

General

So after a while of borrowing multiply pi's, i've managed to buy one. Of course the shipment was delayed so it arrived at a week full of no time. Finally, i prepared all and started the installation, of course an arch linux (like the guy in the advertisement, "what else?" ;-)). The installation was quite easy, i struggeld a bit with the resizing of my partitions. The magic hint, resizes the extended partition first, then you are able to resize the root partition and everything is fine.

After that, i've browsed through the available packages and started setting up the tiny beast. Writing about window managers is a short one, don't do fancy stuff. Notion is working, openbox and fluxbox also. Of course xbmc is running like a charm. But xfce4 and lxde are a bit to much for the little arm. Kde is working better than expected but like chromium, it is far away from running smooth. A nice howto about installing xfce4 on arm arch linux can be found here. Some general beginner tutorials about different raspberry pi distributions can be found here.

What about using known software? Well, you can but keep in mind, it is an arm cpu under the hood. Midori is currently my first choice for browsing the web. If i need something with a gui, pcmanfm is performing well on the pi. Have some minutes left? Read this nice introduction about the desktop world of the raspberry pi.

Other Operation Systems Then Linux

Talking about the upcomming and possible shooting star firefox os, i can only write that i havn't tried it so far. There is a bunch of tutorials out there, like this, that. A list of possible alternative operation systems for the pi can be found here.

What To Do Now?

Well, first i want to try out the media center suitability of the little pi. I like the idea to control the xbmc via an android mobile. I also want to compare xbmc with openELEC. And for the far away future, i want to build zfs on linux on this little box (why?, of course because i can :-D). A git server is also and always an option, lets see. Privoxy, openVPN, tor, the list is getting longer the more i think about it :-).

List Of Links

howto - some basic ion / notion keybinds

After few years with fluxbox it was time to search for something else. Inspired by a friend of mine i searched for tiling window manager.

The ion has some legal problems, i tried out a fork called notion. After a reading the man page and using the windowmanager for a view hours, it is impressive how great it works out of the box. There is also another fork called anion3, just to mention it. There is a already builded package for debian/amd64 behind this link.

Thats why i started writing my howto and want to present it to you but also to me ;-). The "mod1" key should be "alt"-left but you can figure it out by calling "xmodmap" on your console.

keyfunction
General
f1manpage
f2xterm
f3execute
mod1+f3execute lua code
f4ssh
f5file to edit
f6file to view
f9create new workspace
Windowmanagement
mod1+,cycle workspace backward
mod1+.cycle workspace forward
mod1+cclose current object
mod1+tabforward focus
mod1+k+tabbackward focus
mod1+k hmaximize frame horizontal
mod1+k vmaximize frame vertical
mod1+rbegin move/reszie mod
left -> grow in direction
shift left -> shrink in direction
mod1+gquery client window to go
mod1+mdisplay context menu
mod1+k dde-/reattach an object from frame
mod1+k 1switch to first object in current frame
mod1+k btile frame
mod1+k xdestroy frame
mod1+ssplit frame vertically
mod1+k ssplit frame horizontally
mod1+k cclears client owning window
mod1+returntoggle client windows to full screen mode

Refering to the Notion Keybinds i have created a printout. Have fun with it. Current builds can be found at sourceforge.net An tutorial is available on the official wiki-page.

howto - add entry to gdm (gnome desktop manager)

When you install a windowmanager by using make/not using apt-get install, it is possible gdm doesn't know there is a new window manager avaiable. You can help him by creating a new file :-). Create the file by touch or the beloved vi.

sudo vi /etc/share/xsessions/notion.desktop
Input the following text.
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Notion Comment=This session logs you into Notion Exec=notion Icon= Type=Application

Fluxbox themes

While search the fluxbox mint theme, if found other where nice themes and a perfect place to search for them. The fluxbox mint theme is called carp. Other nice themes are cup, synaptic_dark, green_tea, laser_green and finally centurion_green. tenr.de also has a snippet section where you can find usefull things like config files, irssi themes and so one.