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Upgrading the Pi...
Dec. 1st, 2012 09:24 pmSoon after learning that new Raspberry Pi (RasPi) boards would be manufactured with 512 MB of onboard RAM, I decided to order one from Allied, but then learned I might do better through an outfit called Newark. Indeed, my order, placed on November 7th, arrived yesterday.
I also wanted to "upgrade" the capacity of the SD card the system boots from and uses for storage, so I used dd to copy the current contents of my 2-GB SD setup, with all installed software and configurations, onto my Ubuntu laptop (in a so-called "image file"), and then again to copy the image file onto a new 8-GB card that is listed among the SD cards that are known to work with the RasPi. (Yeah, I know that sounds funny, but apparently, far from all SD cards will do, for reasons that—as far as I can see—amount to "That's the way it is.")
Except that it turns out even SD cards on the "approved" list don't necessarily work. Mine, for example, didn't. And from poking around in various places on the 'net, I began to suspect that faster cards—such as the so-called "Class 8" and "Class 10" cards—might be the problem, because most of the folks whose posts I read seemed to be having trouble with those kinds of cards, while there were few complaints from folks using the older, slower "Class 4" cards.
Initially, that really didn't make a lot of sense. My previous experience with computer hardware has been that if your memory is "faster" (i.e., can change state faster) than the hardware that may be reading from or writing to that memory, you're okay. But based on the error message I was getting—the wording of which I do not recall exactly, except to say it was a timeout error—I suspect that what was happening was that the RasPi had sent some kind of query to the SD card, but by the time the RasPi was ready to accept a reply, said reply had already been sent by the SD card, and after a timeout period had elapsed, the RasPi decided no reply had been sent, triggering the error.
In the end, however, it doesn't matter what I think causes this kind of problem. What matters is whether or not I can solve it.
So, I dug up a Class 4 8-GB card, transferred the image to it, and... it worked! The distribution (which comes as a 2-GB image) even has a configuration utility that allows you to "expand" the disk to fit all available storage (which avoids having to open a terminal window and start using fdisk and other utility programs), so after all is said and done, I've added about 6 GB of "disk space" to my RasPi setup. (With my old 2-GB card, I had previously had about 350 MB free after uninstalling all the GUI stuff—as I do not expect to run the board as anything other than a headless web server—and while you can fit quite a bit of text into that space, it's still a bit claustrophobic.)
In other news, I'm trying out Tim Ferriss's recipe for Chocolate Wine, but I'm not seeing any "cocoa butter" rising to the top after melting the dark chocolate into the red dessert wine. The recipe does call for me to wait for several hours, so I've put the mixture in the fridge and will check it in the morning.
In yet other news, I'm trying a new method of making sauerkraut, employing a quart Mason jar. More details if it works.
Cheers...
I also wanted to "upgrade" the capacity of the SD card the system boots from and uses for storage, so I used dd to copy the current contents of my 2-GB SD setup, with all installed software and configurations, onto my Ubuntu laptop (in a so-called "image file"), and then again to copy the image file onto a new 8-GB card that is listed among the SD cards that are known to work with the RasPi. (Yeah, I know that sounds funny, but apparently, far from all SD cards will do, for reasons that—as far as I can see—amount to "That's the way it is.")
Except that it turns out even SD cards on the "approved" list don't necessarily work. Mine, for example, didn't. And from poking around in various places on the 'net, I began to suspect that faster cards—such as the so-called "Class 8" and "Class 10" cards—might be the problem, because most of the folks whose posts I read seemed to be having trouble with those kinds of cards, while there were few complaints from folks using the older, slower "Class 4" cards.
Initially, that really didn't make a lot of sense. My previous experience with computer hardware has been that if your memory is "faster" (i.e., can change state faster) than the hardware that may be reading from or writing to that memory, you're okay. But based on the error message I was getting—the wording of which I do not recall exactly, except to say it was a timeout error—I suspect that what was happening was that the RasPi had sent some kind of query to the SD card, but by the time the RasPi was ready to accept a reply, said reply had already been sent by the SD card, and after a timeout period had elapsed, the RasPi decided no reply had been sent, triggering the error.
In the end, however, it doesn't matter what I think causes this kind of problem. What matters is whether or not I can solve it.
So, I dug up a Class 4 8-GB card, transferred the image to it, and... it worked! The distribution (which comes as a 2-GB image) even has a configuration utility that allows you to "expand" the disk to fit all available storage (which avoids having to open a terminal window and start using fdisk and other utility programs), so after all is said and done, I've added about 6 GB of "disk space" to my RasPi setup. (With my old 2-GB card, I had previously had about 350 MB free after uninstalling all the GUI stuff—as I do not expect to run the board as anything other than a headless web server—and while you can fit quite a bit of text into that space, it's still a bit claustrophobic.)
In other news, I'm trying out Tim Ferriss's recipe for Chocolate Wine, but I'm not seeing any "cocoa butter" rising to the top after melting the dark chocolate into the red dessert wine. The recipe does call for me to wait for several hours, so I've put the mixture in the fridge and will check it in the morning.
In yet other news, I'm trying a new method of making sauerkraut, employing a quart Mason jar. More details if it works.
Cheers...
