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Backyard haunted houses, carving pumpkins, elaborate decorations, jumping out to scare trick-or-treaters; Halloween is packed with the DIY spirit. People’s desire to be scared or scare others is primal. It’s the “fight or flight” response, the deep psychological need to survive. Halloween give many the chance to feel the fear, since back in our minds we know there is no real danger. Perhaps it is just the excitement that drives us to walk through that haunted house. Either way, it’s fun for both the builder and the viewer.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced it has sold 1.75 million of its Linux-ready, open platform Raspberry Pi single board computers (SBCs) to date, with one million of them manufactured in the U.K. In other Pi news, the foundation announced a deal in which the $25 Pi Model A and the $30 Pi Camera Board are […]

The $35 credit-card-sized computer, designed for hobbyists, developers, and students, is a basically a small motherboard outfitted with its own CPU and a variety of ports.

Harnessing the power of the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi microcomputer, the versatility of LEGO bricks and incredibly good taste in television animation, Michael Thomas has created an amazing tribute to Adventure Time's unsung hero, Beemo. Who wants to play video games?

The Simple DirectMedia Layer post-SDL2.0 code now has support for the popular low-cost low-end Raspberry Pi ARM platform.

Good news if you are a Raspberry Pi fan as SDL2 now supports it, which does mean technically in future more games could work on it.

At OSCON this year, Regina ten Bruggencate and Kim Spiritus gave a talk called How To Get More Kids To Code. I got in late (I was waiting in line to get a free signed copy of The Art of Community by Jono Bacon) so I missed the beginning of this session, but came in as they were demoing Scratch.

Work is being prepared to merge support into the XBMC multimedia software so that support for various emulated/retro gaming platforms can be played and presented directly within the XBMC software.

It was inevitable. Back when the Raspberry Pi was announced, I knew I eventually would use one to power a beer fridge.

At the Maker Faire in New York City, ValentFX showed off two open source FPGA boards that stack with BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi SBCs, and also unveiled BBot, a BeagleBone-based drink serving robot built with an earlier FPGA board version.

PyCon UK’s Raspberry Jam played host to 35 children from around the country. It was a first taste of coding for many of the kids and a valuable lesson for how we can revolutionise school education…

The Linux Foundation held its LinuxCon North America conference in New Orleans this week. This post provides short summaries and links to videos from 12 keynote sessions videos featuring luminaries including Linus Torvalds, Google’s Chris DiBona, and Valve’s Gabe Newell, Raspberry Pi’s Eben Upton, and more. LinuxCon is the Linux Foundation’s major public conference, and […]

The low-cost low-end Raspberry Pi ARM development boards are running quite happily now with Wayland and using its Weston compositor. The performance is better than with an X.Org Server and Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton has called it the future of Linux desktop graphics...

Linux is landing on gaming systems and embedded devices.....At the annual LinuxCon USA conference that started Sept. 16, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin detailed the current state of Linux and how it is evolving in 2013.

As it is a Friday I thought I would share the story of how I found my cat using the Raspberry PI.

Recently (actually 3 weeks ago) I bought a Raspberry Pi for myself and it wasn't until today that I power it on by the first time. Call it RealLife™ for simplicity.

I remember my first colocated server rather fondly. It was a 1U Supermicro that had been decommissioned from my employer after a few years' service. Although it was too old and slow for my company, the 800MHz CPU, 1GB RAM and 36GB SCSI storage was perfect for my needs back in 2005.

PiCE is a new case for Raspberry Pi. The project is currently raising fund on KickStarter. What makes PiCE special is its solid design which can protect the tiny computer from many things, even the rain.

With only nine days to go now, the Raprio Kickstarter has been a huge success. Thanks to notoriety from the Raspberry Pi foundation, and many open source blogs talking about it, the Raspberry Pi powered robot has over 300% of its funding already.

The stated purpose of the Raspberry Pi is to provide a simple, inexpensive platform for experimentation. For myself, the US$35 (plus shipping, tariffs, and all that) has paid off in spades, giving me the opportunity to attain that Holy Grail of Linux programming: writing a kernel module.

Much has been made about Google's $35 Chromecast dongle, which lets users stream their desktops and video to large screen TVs, but there is now a similar application for the Raspberry Pi that offers some of the same functionality: PiCast. Its developer has an informational page up here, where he notes: "I thought what do I have that I could use w/HDMI [licensing] and wouldn't be terribly hard to do? My Arduino? Nope BUT my Raspberry Pi can do it all, literally and [at the] same price as the Chromecast."

There are already many articles out there comparing Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and BeagleBone Black; this is not one of those articles. What I was looking for and couldn’t find was a comprehensive article that would summarize all of the pros and cons of the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black, and what each platform is best suited for. When I couldn’t find that article, I decided to write it myself.

At the Def Con hacker conference early next month, O’Connor, a security researcher who runs the consultancy Malice Afterthought, plans to unveil Creepy Distributed Object Locator or CreepyDOL, a system of Linux computers that cost less than $60 each and are designed to be hidden around an urban or suburban area. The little black boxes can wirelessly track the movements of cell phones or other mobile devices, feeding the information they collect into a database where an administrator can monitor targets on a map-based interface. A proof-of-concept version of the system that O’Connor has built includes ten of the spy nodes, each capable of reading the wireless signals of nearby devices and communicating back to a central server by piggybacking on any available Wifi network.

BitTorrent released a beta version of a new Linux- and Android-ready peer-to-peer file sync package. BitTorrent Sync currently operates on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops, Android smartphones and tablets, and an evolving list of Linux-based devices, including the Raspberry Pi and numerous NAS products, enabling on-the-go, secure uploads and sync from mobile to storage devices, as well as M2M/IoT scenarios.

Raspberry Pi embedded development firm Geekroo has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal for a Mini-ITX board and case that extends the RPi into a full-fledged computer (SBC). The Fairywren is equipped with a 24-pin ATX power supply connector, a four-port USB hub, a 2.5-inch HDD bay, a serial port, an IR remote module, GPIO breakout, and sockets for a built-in XBee radio and Arduino Uno boards.

Cheap, low-end PCs -- such as the Raspberry Pi and Parallella -- have become quite popular with do-it-yourself fans. Now, CompuLab, an Israeli computer OEM, is throwing its hat into the ring with its $99 Utilite mini-PC, which might also serve businesses well.

Ever since the announcement of the Raspberry Pi, sites all across the Internet have offered lots of interesting and challenging uses for this exciting device. Although all of those ideas are great, the most obvious and perhaps least glamorous use for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) is creating your perfect home server.

Password and credit-card details leak online every day. So no one really knows just how much personally identifiable information is available by clicking on the right link to Pastebin, Pastie, or similar sites. Using a platform that runs on the hobbyist Raspberry Pi platform to drink from this fire hose, a security researcher has cataloged more than 3,000 such posts in less than three months while adding scores more each week.

I work at a public library in the Washington DC-area and often think about what needs to be designed into the space of future public libraries. I was recently visiting the MAKE magazine website when I saw a fascinating how-to video about building your own portable Raspberry Pi game system.

The H's Hardware Hacks section collects stories about the wide range of uses of open source in the rapidly expanding area of open hardware. It's where you can find out about interesting projects, the re-purposing of devices and the creation of a new generation of deeply open systems. In this edition: turn a Raspberry Pi into a Tor anonymising proxy, RS Components introduces a site for open source hardware projects, two new boards to control Arduino projects from mobile devices, and an augmented reality backend for Drupal.

Beagleboard's latest offering, the Beaglebone Black, seems to be out to get one over the trendy Raspberry Pi. If you're seeking a compact board around which to construct a hardware project, you might well want to see which of these boards might best meet your needs.

The project, which is called Raspberry Pi Cloud, is the idea of four lecturers at the University’s School of Computing. The four doctors believed that the knowledge about the cloud will play a very important role in their students’ future as IT professionals. But it was hard for researchers and students to develop a good practical knowledge due to the secrecy nature of how cloud computing infrastructure works.

Real Time Logic announced an Linux-compatible embeddable webserver designed for supporting server-side web applications. Based on the Lua scripting language, Mako Server integrates technologies such as Apache, SQLite, and SMTP and HTTPS clients, and is said to be compact enough to host web services on a Raspberry Pi.

Three golden nuggets from the Southeast LinuxFest: "RPi+", video editing, and spam tips.

A few weeks ago I was able to attend the Mini Maker Faire in Cleveland, Ohio where I got to meet with local makers and discuss a variety of subjects including Raspberry Pi, 3D Printing, and programming. One of the highlights of my trip there was meeting Dave and Lauren Egts. Lauren was there presenting on the Scratch Game she designed: The Great Guinea Pig Escape.

Raspberry Pi hackers now have a new OS option built by the The Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT). Pidora is a Fedora remix optimized specifically for the Raspberry Pi based on a brand-new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture."The Pidora build was performed at Seneca's Centre for Development of Open Technology based on our experience operating the Fedora ARMv5tel/armv7hl build farm over the past three years," said Chris Tyler, Industrial Research Chair at the CDOT.

Since this month was our Raspberry Pi issue, I did some research on "what folks do with their Raspberry Pi". I sent queries out via Twitter, Facebook, the Linux Journal Web site and even the #linuxjournal IRC room. When it comes to doing extra-geeky projects with the RPi, every person I spoke with mentioned buying parts from Adafruit.

Transforming a bare-bones Raspberry Pi into a fully-functional portable station is a popular pastime among enterprising users, and you can easily find instructions on how to build a Kindleberry Pi, a Kindleberry Wireless, and even a Raspberry Pi Linux laptop.

Raspbian is the Debian Linux distribution optimized for the ARMv7 Raspberry Pi. Older versions of Raspbian are based upon Debian Linux 6.0 on the Linux 3.1 kernel and GCC 4.4.5. However, the latest Debian Linux 7.0 on the latest Raspbian package-set has the Linux 3.6.11 armv6l kernel and GC 4.6.

Last week I wrote about the emergence of a new Wayland Weston compositor renderer for the Raspberry Pi. There was a fair amount of discussion about it and since then additional details have emerged...

UDOO is a new development platform designed to be compatible with Arduino, Linux, Android and the Google 2012 SDK. Its designers state that their goal was to bring together the best of Arduino and the Raspberry Pi in one platform.

The Wandboard is a tiny computer or developer board which looks a bit like a Raspberry Pi, but which has a starting price about three times as high and which packs significantly more power.

Raspberry Pi users have another operation system option, after the folks behind Fedora Linux changed their recipe and issued a “remix” of the OS for the tiny computer. Pidora 18, as the release is known, is not the very first of its kind, as two previous versions are available but weren't optimised for the ARMv6 architecture. Pidora 18 has undergone that optimisation and is therefore ready to run on the Pi.

Wardriving is the act of searching for Wifi networks by a someone on a vehicle, using a laptop, smartphone or personal digital assistant. A 22 year old IT security consultant and motorcycle enthusiast from New Zealand, Denis Andzakovic, has taken wardriving to a new level of coolness, with the help of the mighty tiny Raspberry Pi.

From the 'Good Things Come in Small Packages' files:

You can now add another Linux distro to the list that will run on the Raspberry Pi. The core distro for the small device is the Debian based Raspian and there is also an Arch based Linux for the Pi too.

And now once again, we've got a Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi as well.

Who says you need a few million bucks to build a supercomputer? Joshua Kiepert put together a Linux-powered Beowulf cluster with Raspberry Pi computers for less than $2,000.

Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology released an optimized Fedora 18 Remix for the Raspberry Pi, and unveiled a new name for the remix. “Pidora 18,” based on a new build of Fedora optimized for ARMv6, features speedier performance and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set, says the Pidora project team.

We recently set out to design a mini desktop computer with the wildly popular Raspberry Pi single board computer. The Raspberry Pi is a Linux-driven, ARM processor-based micro computer that is known for its low cost and small size. People use the device for a variety of projects, from micro-servers to low cost media players. Basically, our goal was to turn what is currently one of the cheapest bare-bones computer boards into a fully enclosed mini desktop computer that could be taken anywhere without the need for cabling or setup...

A fixed-rate timer is not part of the ARM specification, but most ARM-based SoC’s have such a timer. The Raspberry Pi is no exception. However, reading its timer in Linux takes a Unix hacker’s understanding.

In m23 rock 13.1 there are a lot of visible changes: the web interface can now be adapted with themes, Linux Mint 13 with Mate and Cinnamon was added and you can now install m23 on a Raspberry Pi.