While I wait for my Raspberry Pi to ship I have seen that my favourite (and first choice for my Raspberry Pi) Linux distribution is now available to download (torrent also available).
More information can be found on the Arch Linux ARM website.
The simplicity of Arch Linux make it the perfect OS (I feel) for the Raspberry Pi. Now, I just need my Pi to turn up.
I’ve been following the development of the Raspberry Pi pretty much since it was announced, and since then I have thought of numerous uses for a tiny, low powered, yet powerful and cheap (£16* without ethernet, £22* with) device.
My main reason is to run one as a media box plugged into my TV via the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port, and last week the XBMC team released a video of their software running on a Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is capable of decoding 1080p video and with it’s HDMI port make it a perfect media streamer.
The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU is capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries.
Raspberry Pi’s should hopefully start shipping late Janusry, early Februrary 2012, and I cannot wait!
* Prices are an estimate based on current conversion rates.