The Raspberry Pi – An Introduction and more

What’s a Raspberry Pi?

Well it’s small credit card sized single board computer designed and produced here in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote teaching of basic computer programming in schools and colleges.

Hardware: Broadcom BCM2835 System on a Chip (SoC): ARM1176JZ- S 700 MHz processor
VideoCore IV GPU,
512MB RAM.
SD card for booting and long term storage.

The Raspberry Pi is an open source project. Schematics and software source code are freely available.

The Performance is equivalent to a 300MHz Pentium II PC from the late 90’s.

Linux is the preferred operating environment, many different distributions are available.

Supported Operating Systems:

Linux Raspbian, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux ARM

RISC OS

Unix: FreeBSD, NetBSD

Plan 9

Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

Google Chrome OS

Firefox OS

AROS

And many more…