I recently received my Raspberry PI from RS a few weeks ago. Here I plan to document the oddities and things I learn. If only such that I can look them up when I forget.

I can wholly recommend the case sold by these guys it  fits perfectly.

If you plan to have your root FS on a USB harddrive, you need to upgrade the firmware, either using the tool by hexxeh using his awesome util found (https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update) or by manually pulling the latest from https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware

 

If you want to play audio from mplayer, it’s broken. Well very buggy there’s currently an open issue https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/2 addressing it in which anumber of things are suggested. Although it can be bodged round using “mplayer -ao sdl” to play viasdl which some reason gets round (from my understanding) the buffer underrun in the alsa module. - This was fixed! 😛

 

A good powersupply is vital, otherwise you can expect all of the issues mentioned over at: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Troubleshooting_power_problems

Pointless Things Discovered:

LAMMPS (http://lammps.sandia.gov/) can be run on the PI, it is however very slow. Using stock debian-arm and lammps built with gcc -mfloat-abi=softfp. I managed to achieve 100ps NPT in 89 hours for alanine with 1728TIP3P water molecules. This could be improved if I moved to Raspbian (http://www.raspbian.org/) which is built to use the hardware floating point unit.