I got mine from the US, thanks to my mother travelling back. I got it in 20 days in the US. Got a ModelB, wireless keyboard/mouse and a USB wifi adapter.
My intent was to convert my HDTV into a Smart TV. My nephew all the donkey's work of downloading the distributions, appropriate package setc and did the set up. We loaded XBMC/ Rasbian+XBMC /OpenElec to try how these work. Raspbian + XBMC gave some dependency errors and rebooted twice. XBMC is good but OpenELEC seems a lot smoother and responsive. XBMC also rebooted once as I was using it but OpenELEC was stable. The wifi dongle RTL8183cu based ran out of the box thanks to the drivers included in all these distros. The board was powered from the USB port of the TV and display using HDMI. We tried playing a HD movie from the sdcard and it played flawlessly. We then tried streaming from (a) Samba share (b) NFS share. Both resulted in buffering. Increasing the buffer from 5MB to 150MB delayed the buffering but did not eliminate it. Wired connections plays without buffering. Problem area is the wifi. Research showed that the USB port current draw for external devices is capped at 140mA by polyfuses. Many dongle drop rates if not enough power is available. Next steps: a) Try a mains driven USB power to the R-Pi instead of a 500mA USB power and see if the wifi dongle operates at higher speeds. b) Use a powered USB hub for the dongle and see of speeds improve. P.S: One big surprise I had was that the XBMC interface was operable using my TV's remote thanks to HDMI's bidirectional control lines. I also downloaded an Android app for XBMC control and it worked like a charm. -- Mohan Sundaram _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
