I bought a Raspberry Pi this past weekend at Maker Faire NYC. I didn’t really know what to do with it, but at $40 I figured I wouldn’t have much to lose.
The next day I received an email from my Subversion service that my payment didn’t go through. So first use, I set up a subversion server on the Pi. In time I will transfer my repositories from the web to the Pi and cancel my commercial Subversion account.
Next, I had run out of ethernet ports on my router. So, in order to use the Pi I had to disconnect something. Well, my AirPort Express was using a port. Since I already have an AirPort Extreme, the Express is only being used for Airplay, a service that lets you select where to play your music from your Mac or iDevice. I discovered that there’s an opensource project called Shairtunes (Airplay used to be named AirTunes) which mimics an Airplay device. So I followed these steps and had a replacement for my AirPort express. I did run into one problem, Shairtunes wouln’t run and gave this error: Can't locate Net/SDP.pm in @inc. You need to install the missing code. I don’t even know what it’s for, but the solution is:
# for some reason the fix doesn't work
# unless you run as the superuser, plain sudo din't work
sudo su
cpan install Net::SDP # just say yes to everything
I won’t repeat all the install steps since there are so many Raspberry Pi tutorials out there. But, if run into a snag leave a comment.
Overall, I’m very happy I picked up the Raspberry Pi, even if one of my use cases for the Pi is a solution to a problem it created.