Welcome to the first issue of Raspberry Pi Geek.
If you picked up this magazine, it is probably because you own a Raspberry Pi or are curious about Raspberry Pi – the amazing US$ 35 computer that has sparked a revolution.
Raspberry Pi users think small and dream big, imagining ingenious projects that put the unobtrusive Raspberry Pi to work on practical problems. And along the way, they learn things you don't ever discover by pointing and clicking with a smartphone or MacBook.
That learning and discovery is what interests us. Great technical writing with a practical edge is our specialty at Linux New Media. We like to run lean, with minimal hype, inspiring users to do more than they thought they could do with the tools of their computing environment. You might say our mission put us on a collision course with the light and lively Raspberry Pi.
Our goal is to fill every issue of Raspberry Pi Geek with cool hardware projects and real-world studies of interesting software. We'll chronicle the open hardware revolution as it evolves – the people, the tools, the events, and, of course, the best home-built projects from readers like you.
This issue includes an exciting assortment of articles and projects designed to broaden and deepen your knowledge of the Raspberry Pi – and maybe to spark your imagination as you start to develop your own projects.
We begin with some tips on getting better performance from your Raspberry Pi system. "High performance?" you might ask. "If I were a speed demon, I wouldn't be working on $35 hardware." But the whole point is to stay on $35 hardware. These tuning tips could be the difference between an application that does or does not run efficiently on the Raspberry Pi.
For those who are just starting to explore the Raspberry Pi environment, we compare a few of the leading operating systems tailored for Pi, including Raspbian, Pidora, Arch Linux, RISC OS, and PiBang. (By the way, most of our articles use the popular Raspbian in examples and configuration descriptions.) Elsewhere in the issue, we investigate software tools for managing and extending the Raspberry Pi, including monitoring utilities like PhpSysInfo and RPi-Monitor, the Music Player Daemon (MPD), the remote control tool RaspCTL, and an ingenious home monitoring system known as Seheiah.
We've also got hardware projects. Learn how to install a safe shutdown switch on your Raspberry Pi computer. Use Raspberry Pi to turn your legacy USB printer into a wireless network printer, and water your plants with Arduino. (Yes, we cover other open hardware boards like the Arduino in addition to the Raspberry Pi.) Programmers will find an article on how to create a custom web interface with the Bootstrap toolkit, as well as a look at building a game with the kid-friendly scratch programming language.
The articles in this issue range from beginner to advanced, but they all assume you have a Raspberry Pi system up and running with some basic knowledge of how to use it. If you are looking for a formal introduction to the Rasp Pi environment, check out the Raspberry Pi Handbook, which you can order online [1]. You also might want to visit the HowTo Corner at our website [2], where you'll find tips and tutorials on configuring your Raspberry Pi.
Whether you are a beginner or an expert, a child savant or a grizzled Atari veteran, we've got something for you in this issue. Read on for a big, juicy slice of Raspberry Pi.
Joe Casad, Editor in Chief