Raspberry Pi
An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!
FAQs
What's a Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It's a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.
I'm on the waiting list -- cannot wait to get my hands on it to play and see what it can do. The videos are impressive -- now if only they can get their manufacturing glitches worked out and sell the things!
If they keep their promise about the price, this will be very interesting. But I've seen this sort of thing broken before.
Just imagine what you could use this for, though! Suddenly you could put a cheap networked computer anywhere you want. Data loggers, micro servers, printing services, custom hobby things, etc, etc, etc. And it can hold a real OS, not a stripped-down toy one.
How did you get on the waiting list, incidentally? Or do you mean you joined the mailing list?
Absolutely!! I'd also like to get my hands on 10 or 15 and put together a mini-cluster.
I went to one of the two distributors listed on the rasberrypi home page ( Raspberry Pi | An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!) the day of the announcement and registered. RS Components | Electronic and Electrical Components is taking registrations, and will be selling in the order of received registrations as units arrive. They've had such a great response that they're limiting one per customer. Unfortunately, there's no indication of where I am on that list, so we sit back and wait.
I assume that Design Engineer Community | Online Electronic Resources and Support Homepage - element14 is doing a similar waiting list, but I randomly picked RS and went there. Today there is a bit more information about the two companies than there was the day of the announcement, but in the fullness of time I'm not sure it will matter much.
This is reminiscent of the OLPC initiative. The most intriguing part is that this is yet another avenue humanity is pursuing to drive open source systems forward. Am looking forward to seeing this one succeed in a very big way.
I bet we can credit the smartphone revolution for making this economically feasible. Millions of machines with similar capabilities(ARM-linux, USB, card-reader, multimedia) are already in people's pockets...