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by gbog 4884 days ago
To those always replying to raspberry articles that it can be done with other setups, and that it's nothing new, I think you're missing the point:

All those tutorials show that a single very cheap and well designed piece of open hardware can be very versatile and that everything we tend to see as magic is just a one page how-to long.

I'm in my forties, an since I have had my first walkman I wanted to get inside the machine, to drive it dwork my, from the bowels. I have seen iPods, but can you ssh in an iPod? I have seen media centers, but can you bulk rename files or script it?

Now with my raspberry I finally got my dream for real, and I can even ssh to it from my phone when I'm away.

2 comments

> I have seen iPods, but can you ssh in an iPod?

If you jailbreak it you can. Here's[1] a one page how-to long guide.

> I have seen media centers, but can you bulk rename files or script it?

Of course, providing you're using something like XBMC. For renaming you don't even need to script, there's friendly programs[2] out there if you want.

> Now with my raspberry I finally got my dream for real, and I can even ssh to it from my phone when I'm away.

I'm glad you're enjoying your Pi, but the argument about it being possible to do with other setups is just as valid. You can SSH to almost anything that'll run SSH from your phone.

[1] - http://guides.macrumors.com/SSH_into_your_iPod_touch_(Window...

[2] - http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Category:Rename_tools

I didn't made myself clear enough. I know I can ssh to an iPod, and to my Android phone, but I don't own anything there, I cannot install vim with the few plugins I like, I cannot install and use unison to sync files. In also sshed to a printer, but what can you do there?
I'm sorry but you keep saying that you can't do things that are eminently possible.

You can install vim and unison on an iPod. If you jailbreak an iPod you can get a full compile stack from cydia.

As for a printer, that's not what we were talking about. You seem to have made an apples (no pun intended) to oranges argument. Of course you're subject to the limitations of whatever OS you're dealing with. Printers that provide SSH access do so to allow you to securely administrate the printer, not to run vim. That's not to say that you can't run vim on a CUPS print server box and do what you want that way.

Yes it's cheap.

It's not really novel though, there are a lot of other things out there that are interesting too. It's also not quite as open as it could be, for instance the bootloader on my sheevaplug from '09 was able to be hacked, flashed and updated to support more boot devices (just as an example). And some of us were doing this whole Debian/ARM box/USB enclosure/fileserver thing back in '05 with the linksys NSLU2, which wasn't much more expensive back then. Much less capable of course, but...

I guess it just rubs some folks up the wrong way. In reality it's awesome that so many people are getting an intro to linux this way, but it also feels like a bunch of teenagers who think their generation invented music :)