Over this Christmas vacation I set myself a number of pet projects that I'd normally not have time to do during the rest of the year. Over the last 6 months or so I've been playing with the Raspberry Pi, but not really pushing it a lot - more a case of playing around with it. So I decided that I'd try and make all of my projects over Christmas relate to the Pi in one way or another. This blog and the follow up, will relate what happened.
OK, so before we really get going it's worth looking at the Pi setup. In keeping with its background, setting up the Pi is pretty simple and you can find details in a number of places including the official Pi site. But I'll include my configuration here for completeness. First, I've been using one of the original Model B instances, i.e., one with 256 Meg of memory and not the newly updated version with 512 Meg. As a result, if you've got a newer version then you may be able to tweak a few settings, such as the swap space.
Because I'm playing with JDK 6 and 7, I used the soft-float variant of Wheezy. After burning that to an SD card, remember to use rasp-config to get back the entire disk space, or you'll find an 8Gig SD card only appears to have a few hundred Meg free! And don't forget to use the right kind of SD card - faster is better. I run my Pi headless (no free monitor or keyboard these days), so initially I had it connected to my router via an ethernet cable and then immediately configured wifi. How you do this will depend upon the wifi adapter you use, but I'm happy with the Edimax EW-7811Un and you can get information about how to update the kernel with the right driver from a number of places.
Once wifi was up and going, I changed swap size for the Pi. In the past this wasn't an issue, but then I hadn't been about to build Arjuna, Fuse, vert.x and MongoDb! You can modify swap by editing /etc/dphys-swapfile and then running /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile stop followed by /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile start. Initially I started off with 256 Meg of swap, but as you'll see later, this wasn't always sufficient! Finally let's start by adding openjdk 6 (sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jdk) followed by git and maven (sudo apt-get install maven2 git).
So this brings us to a base from which we can proceed with the real projects. The first one, which was building Arjuna/JBossTS/Narayana, was pretty straightforward compared to the others and has been documented elsewhere. Which means in the next instalment we'll look Fuse Fabric, vert.x and because of that project, MongoDB.
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