If you haven't heard of the open platform-friendly, inexpensive Linux-powered computing platform known as Raspberry Pi by now, you will be for years to come. Just as the Altair hailed the era of the personal computer, the Raspberry Pi is ushering in a new era of powerful, stunningly low-cost PCs on a board not much larger than an Arduino Uno.
The Raspberry Pi folks have been getting a lot of attention for their $35 PC with an ARM-based processor and support for some open source software. But as the cost of computer components continues to drop, the Raspberry Pi is hardly the only inexpensive PC capable of running Linux.
The Raspberry Pi $35 Linux computer sold out within hours of going on sale in February - with demand for the device reportedly hitting 700 orders per minute. The upshot is a lot of people who wanted the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi have been left empty-handed - with anyone ordering the device today unlike to receive one until about July.
Make it small, make it cheap, and people will buy it. - Two tiny, single-board Linux computers with sweet names that debuted at nearly the same time have attracted disproportionately large attention from PC consumers this week: the Raspberry Pi, and the FXI Cotton Candy.
Many were talking yesterday about why the forthcoming $25/$35 Raspberry Pi system won't ship in kit form, but of more interest to Phoronix readers out of that blog post would be the details concerning their Linux graphics driver stack and what they will be supporting.
PHYTEC’s production-ready phyCORE-OMAP4430 and Linux BSP provide a core foundation so that developers do not have to design an OMAP4 based embedded application from the ground up.
FXI's Cotton Candy at CES is proof of how Linaro can help a system vendor rapidly develop a product that is running the latest Android ICS and Ubuntu. FXI said in it's announcement it leveraged the Linaro for ARM open software and tools and leveraged its access to the ARM Mali Graphics software development ecosystem.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced this week that its $35 Linux computer has entered the manufacturing stage. The system, which is an open board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM, could be available for sale within a matter of weeks.
Anand and Jason had a chance to speak with FXI a while back, but at the time they weren’t able to give him any hands-on time with their micro-computer concept device, codenamed Cotton Candy. They’re demoing the hardware at CES, and this time we were able to play around with the device and get a feel for what it can do.