It arrived last week and after opening the box he sent it in my plans changed. Yes it was a bit scuffed and beaten up and it had a nasty ugly sticker over the Apple logo (now replaced by several raspberry Pi stickers) but it still looked quite nice with a bit of weight to it, It feels like I could crack a nut or two with no real damage to it and when comparing it to other 6 year old computers I have it's much nicer with better specs. My friend purchased &  installed Lion* on it for me, and as he'd paid for the OS I felt I couldn't really just wipe it & install Linux on it without at least giving OS X a chance. After the first day of trying to use OS X and get used to the fact that there is only one "mouse button" I was ready to defenestrate the Macbook or  give up and put Linux on it but the fact that OS X had cost my friend money stopped me and I forced myself to keep OS X on there and try to get used to it. The second day was a bit better, I still kept trying to right click, which is a tiny bit difficult when there is only one "mouse button" and I couldn't find stuff  but after installing macports, which took a couple of hours as the document i found on how to install macports seemed to be wrong or at least for a different version of OS X than it claimed to be for things started to get better. It's now been 7 days since I received the Macbook Pro & i'm beginning to understand why people like Apple hardware. I still wouldn't buy one new, mostly because I would never be able to afford it or even justify paying that much upfront for a computer but when I see how well it performs even being 6 year old hardware I must say i'm pretty impressed and it does work really well for my needs. I am sharing the wifi on the Macbook with my Raspberry Pi and that is working really well and although I am still very low on the OS X learning curve i am slowly getting used to it and learning how to do things the OS X way. There are things I don't like about it, the forced usage of the App store..., but i'd say that Apple have a partial convert and if another macbook ever comes my way i'll not turn my nose up at it.

*I believe that Lion is going to be the last version of OS X that will be installable on this Macbook Pro as I recall reading that Mountain Lion is going to drop support for Macbooks build prior to 2007 so I may end up install Linux on it eventually anyway but we'll see.

Within seconds of the announcement that the Raspberry Pi was now available for purchase and even though this initial batch is limited to one per person the stores for both of the licensed manufacturers had crashed, raspberry pi was trending in the top 3 on twitter and the IRC channel (#raspberrypi) had over 500 users. For the next couple of hours every time the Farnell or RS stores came back online they were crashed again by the throngs of  geeks all trying to order their Raspberry Pi. It seems that not only have the Foundation designed a great tiny computer and a cheap price they have also designed an effective method to harness the collective power of the geek community to DDoS an online store. There are some teething problems with the foundation's licensed manufacturing partners such as the RS online store seems to be willing to only sell to companies in the UK (you need a UK address and company name to even register), their affiliates stores in other countries don't have the Raspberry Pi listed as even an out of stock item and they seemed to have forgotten that the 29th was release day as it has been said by some on twitter and in the IRC channel that RS said it's not available until later in the week. Farnell also have some problems too unrelated to the fact that their store crashed. There seems to be some confusion with regard to fees, shipping costs, taxes etc. and some of their affiliates in other countries don't have the Raspberry Pi available for purchase or even backorder. I believe that this first batch is actually a special case in that people who have managed to order a Raspberry Pi will be getting one from the Foundation manufactured batch so things were a little confused and there was some miscommunication within RS & Farnell between the various departments involved in making the deal with the foundation, the sales department and the website department etc. Eventually once things have died down and RS & Farnell are selling Raspberry Pi's they have built themselves that all the these initial problems will sort themselves out and that people will be able to get hold of Raspberry Pi's much quicker than if the foundation was building and selling the Raspberry Pi themselves.

One thing that might have sneaked passed a few people in the announcement was that the Model A is now much better value for money as they have been able to double it's RAM to be the same as the Model B's 256MB. This means that the only difference between the Model A & B is the extra USB slot and the Ethernet connector.

So how do we break the Internet in 10 easy steps?

1. Go to the pub with friends and complain about how poor the standard of programming skills of applicants to University are in the UK and that things were much better in my day. Now get of my lawn you darn kids.
2. Design a cheap, simple, tiny SBC that uses a TV or HDMI enabled monitor as it's display
3. Wait 5 years
4. Setup a website and forum and post articles about how the computer was designed, what you are doing at the moment and that you'll be releasing soon.
5. Get lots of articles about your tiny computer in both the old and new media, bonus points if you can get slashdot to post a story at least twice a month.
6. Post lots of stories on your website that release day will be quite soon.
7. Post more stories on your website that release day is almost here
8. Post a story that release day is in a couple of days
9. Warn your sales partners that lots and lots of people will want to try to buy your SBC as you have a mailing list with over 100,000 subscribers, a forum with thousands of members, lots of twitter followers... and you have only made 10,000 of them
10. ANNOUNCE that sales are now possible and post links to the stores of your sales partners then sit back with a Glass of wine in your hand and laugh manically while watching the Internet being brought to it's knees Bwahahahahahahahahaha

If your main machine is a linux system then you should have no problem, a standard dd will be fine but under windows not only do we not have a dd program (we do but it's not a pleasant experience and windows users are not command line junkies on the whole so use something like Win32DiskImager or equivalent) but there are a couple of gotchas that might catch the unaware out.

The main gotcha is that although your computer has a builtin sd card reader/writer and it works with your cellphone or camera sd card perfectly well it might not work for creating a bootable sd. The biggest problem builtin sd card reader/writer is the ricoh one in HP laptops although other makes of sd card hardware and laptops also have this problem. When you use a builtin reader/writer and it is goingto fail it doesn't always tell you that it's failed so the first thing you now something is wrong is that your raspberry pi (or other target device) won't boot So although you have a builtin sd card reader/writer it is a good idea to get hold of a USB SD card reader/writer and use that for making your bootable SD card. [I have no real idea why builtin reader/writers have problems making bootable sd cards but my thinking is that the controller in the builtin ones was cut down for windows machines to save a few pennies as noone thought that they'd want to write to the 0 to xxxx areas of the SD card]

The other gotcha you should be aware of is that SD cards are formatted and written to in a slightly "weird" way. An unformatted/blank SD card is actually full of 1's and when you write to it it just flips the appropriate bits to 0. An sd card can read at the bit level but only writes at a block level so you'll end up with areas that can't be used for writing any more as they need to reverse a bit back from a 1 to a 0 to perform the write and deleting/erasing the file won't actually free up all that space as it spans several blocks. So if you are going to use an SD card that you have used before you'll want to format it before using it with the raspberry pi. Don't use the windows formatter with your SD card as although it'll sort of work it won't have set all the bits to 1 instead user the panasonic sd card formatter which you can find at http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/download/index.html [I can never remember which way around it is for when an sd card is in an unused state, whether it's all 0's or all 1's but i'm leaning towards all 1's as that is what has seemed to have stuck in my head].

To quickly summarize if making a bootable sd card on windows.

1. Use a USB SD Card reader/writer
2. Use the panasonic sd card formatter
3. There is a windows version of dd but use Win32DiskImager or equivalent instead

I found an Algol68 interpreter on sourceforge that seems to be still maintained (last update in 2011 and a related piece of software updated this year) http://algol68.sourceforge.net/ so i thought i'd give it a go using an ARM fedora rootfs. I ran the configure script and saw that it would like gsl & ncurses so I added the runtimes and headers using yum inside scratchbox2 and then reran the configure script  and then make and after adding the usual "-fsigned-char" it built with non of the usual X86 C to ARM C warnings.

I ran a couple of test programs from http://rosettacode.org and they all worked and although it did fail on one test when I ran the test suite for the interpreter I think that was just because it was so slow when running inside nested emulators and there was an error right where the test suite finishes but I don't think that is too serious when just running to see if there are any showstopping problems, which there don't seem to be. I make no guarantees that the binary will actually work for you on real Raspberry Pi hardware or using an other distro other than ARM Fedora14 but it seems to be ok using qemu, a fedora arm rootfs and a bit of finger crossing.

 [raspberry@localhost algol68g-2.3.5]$ sb2 make check make check-TESTS make[1]: Entering directory `/home/raspberry/build/algol68g-2.3.5' [1] Peano curve using Van Wijngaarden's algorithm

. ........ ........ ......... ......... .........
 . . . . . . . . . . .
 ..... .... ..... ..... ..... ..... .... .....
 . . . . .
 ..... .... ..... ..... . .... . .... .....
 . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 . ........ ........ . ..... ..... . .........
 . . .
 ..... ............ ..... ..... ..... . .........
 . . . . . . . . . . .
 ..... .... ..... ..... . .... . .... .....
 . . . . . . .
 . ..... . . .... . ..... ..... .... .....
 . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 ..... .... ..... ..... ..... ......... .........
 .
 .
 ..... .... ..... ..... ..... ......... .........
 . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 . ..... . . .... . ..... ..... .... .....
 . . . . . . .
 ..... .... ..... ..... . .... . .... .....
 . . . . . . . . . . .
 ..... ............ ..... ..... ..... . .........
 . . .
 . ........ ........ . ..... ..... . .........
 . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 ..... .... ..... ..... . .... . .... .....
 . . . . .
 ..... .... ..... ..... ..... ..... .... .....
 . . . . . . . . . . .
 . ........ ........ ......... ......... .........

PASS: check-01.a68
 [2] Mersenne primes by the Lucas-Lehmer test

M_3 has 1 digits
 M_5 has 2 digits
 M_7 has 3 digits
 M_13 has 4 digits
 M_17 has 6 digits
 M_19 has 6 digits
 M_31 has 10 digits
 M_61 has 19 digits
 M_89 has 27 digits
 M_107 has 33 digits
 M_127 has 39 digits
 28 DO s := (s * s - 2) MOD cand
 1
 a68g: runtime error: 1: time limit exceeded (detected in VOID loop-clause
 starting at "FROM" in line 27).
 FAIL: check-02.a68
 [3] Miniature LISP interpreter
 >(1 2 3 4)
 (1 2 3 4)
 >(append (1 2) (3 4))
 (1 2 3 4)
 >(+ 1 (* 2 3))
 7
 >(quit)
 PASS: check-03.a68
 [4] Recursive back-tracking algorithm
 There are 98411 ways to split 1000 cents in 5 10 20 50 100 200 cent coins
 PASS: check-04.a68
 [5] Building a decision-tree
 Please name an object
 'rectangle'
 I will guess the object you are thinking of
 rectangle?
 'no'
 What was the object?
 'square'
 Give a question to distinguish 'square'
 'does it have four sides of equal length'
 Does 'does it have four sides of equal length' apply to 'square'?
 'yes'
 Another round?
 'yes'
 I will guess the object you are thinking of
 does it have four sides of equal length?
 'no'
 rectangle?
 'no'
 What was the object?
 'cube'
 Give a question to distinguish 'cube'
 'does it have three dimensions'
 Does 'does it have three dimensions' apply to 'cube'?
 'yes'
 Another round?
 'no'
 PASS: check-05.a68
 (6) Exact determinant of Hilbert matrices using fractions
 Rank 1, determinant 1 / 1, ok
 Rank 2, determinant 1 / 12, ok
 Rank 3, determinant 1 / 2160, ok
 Rank 4, determinant 1 / 6048000, ok
 Rank 5, determinant 1 / 266716800000, ok
 Rank 6, determinant 1 / 186313420339200000, ok
 Rank 7, determinant 1 / 2067909047925770649600000, ok
 Rank 8, determinant 1 / 365356847125734485878112256000000, ok
 Rank 9, determinant 1 / 1028781784378569697887052962909388800000000, ok
 Rank 10, determinant 1 / 46206893947914691316295628839036278726983680000000000, ok
 PASS: check-06.a68
 [7] Hamming numbers
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 8
 9
 10
 12
 15
 16
 18
 20
 24
 25
 27
 30
 32
 36
 2125764000
 PASS: check-07.a68
 [8] Ackermann function
 A(1, 1) = 3
 A(2, 1) = 5
 A(2, 2) = 7
 A(3, 1) = 13
 A(3, 2) = 29
 A(3, 3) = 61
 PASS: check-08.a68
 [9] Synthetic benchmark after Curnow & Wichmann
 1.0 MWhets
 PASS: check-09.a68
 =========================================================
 1 of 9 tests failed
 Please report to Marcel van der Veer <algol68g@xs4all.nl>
 =========================================================
 make[1]: *** [check-TESTS] Error 1
 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/raspberry/build/algol68g-2.3.5'
 make: *** [check-am] Error 2
 [raspberry@localhost algol68g-2.3.5]$

You can find the ARM binary here and the command used to build it was

sb2 CFLAGS="-fsigned-char" ./configure && make

I think you'll agree this has to be worth at least a Bronze medal in the Olympic procrastination event.

Once again if you are using my instructions to build the Raspberry Pi development VM (or a VM for any development using Scratchbox2 and/or qemu) i'd recommend (in no particular order) currently using

• Ubuntu 10.04LTS
• Fedora
• Debian

Now a tip when porting x86 code to ARM using gcc. If you get a lot of warnings when trying to build software originally written in C for x86 for ARM especially things like "comparison is always true/false due to limited range of data type"  the chances are that you aree being bitten by the fact that x86 compilers usually default to signed chars if not specified by the variable declaration while ARM compilers usually default to unsigned chars. If you are using gcc (which you are if you are using my VM or your own installation of Scratchbox2 then the fix is to use the

-fsigned-char

gcc option. e.g.

gcc hello.c -o hello -fsigned-char

Another thing that might prove useful when you have access to the real Raspberry Pi hardware and the standardized distro is that by default the codesourcery toolchain included in the VM by default builds for generic ARMv5. On the whole this really shouldn't matter as ARMv6 can run ARMv5 instructions but there maybe times when you are doing something that needs to use an ARMv6 specific instruction or you are including assembler in the C code or something else where a generic ARM version binary just won't cut it. In that case using the gcc option

-mcpu=arm1176jzf-s

which specifies that gcc emits the correct instructions for the specific ARM core that the Raspberry Pi uses might be helpful.

e.g.

gcc -mcpu=arm1176jzf-s hello.c -o hello

Hunter has also Open Sourced another of his projects as well. Source Tree Visualizer which basically turns your source code tree into a real tree  in a pretty landscape

You can find Hunter's post about QuickGrapher here

and his post on SOurce Tree Visualizer here

Even if these two things don't appeal to you Hunter's blog is always a pretty good read.

1. Installing in subdirectories in the user's home directory makes it easy  to keep things organised.
2. It makes things almost idiotproof when you want to upgrade the ARM toolchain, scratchbox2, qemu or change the seed rootfs etc. as it's pretty much just rename the old directory, create a new directory and if neccessary rerun sb2-init.

1. Open a terminal
2. If you haven't already got git & wget installed. Install them now. On Ubuntu or Debian the command to install them is
3. Create a directory for temporary use. I personally call it hold and change to it.
4. Download scratchbox2 and qemu from their respective git repositories
5. Download the codesourcery ARM toolchain. I have been using the 2011.03 version successfully and I believe it was the last released version before codesourcery was bought by Mentor Graphics who seem to have closed sourced the more recent releases of the toolchain.
6. Then download an ARM rootfs. Eventually we will be able to use the official Raspberry Pi standard rootfs but until that time any ARM based one will do. As I believe that the official Raspberry Pi distribution is going to be Fedora we'll download a Fedora one. In this case we use one I found on the fedora-arm mailing list. http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2011-December/002386.html
7. If you now do a directory listing you will have a terminal window that looks this
8. Now create some more directories.
9. Untar the rootfs The reason we extract the seed rootfs using sudo is that there are some special files that a normal user cannot create when untarring a tarred rootfs. Lots of filenames will scroll before your eyes as the seed rootfs is untarred into the rootfs subdirectory. This will take quite a while so it might be a good time to go and get a drink or take a bathroom break.
10. Extract the codesourcery ARM toolchain into the raspberry_pi_development directory.
11. Do a directory listing of the raspberry_pi_development directory and it will look like the image below.
12. If you haven't already got the SDL and ncurses libaries and  headers installed. Install them now. In Ubuntu and Debian
13. You should also install autoconf, fakeroot and realpath. Fedora users will need to find their own copy of the realpath source as it is not included in the distribution. I found a copy that works on stackoverflow. In Ubuntu and Debian change to scratchbox2 directory and run the autogen.sh script.
14. then run makeYou can ignore all the warnings that will scroll passed and when it finishes the screen will look something like the one below. The interesting lines are the final 4 or 5 which should basically say the same thing that the screenshot does.
15. Scratchbox2 is now installed and we now need to build qemu so cd to the qemu directory
16. To use scratchbox2 you only need to build qemu usermode for ARM, however, I find it useful to also build the ARM system emulation as well (I use the qemu full system emulation for some little hacks and tricks that are beyond the scope of this howto but I will write them up at a later date along with how to use scratchbox2 with real hardware once I have the process down pat & actually have a real Raspberry Pi to test on).
17. Now that scratchbox2, the toolchain, qemu and the seed rootfs are installed we just have a few more steps before we can actually use the VM for compiling software. First of all we need add the scratchbox2 and qemu bin directories to our PATH environment variable. You can do this as a single export statement but so it's clear i'll do it as two. You will also want to add the previous two lines to your .bashrc file. Start your favourite editor and open the .bashrc file and add them to the bottom and in the case of nano save the file using ^x y <enter>. If you are using vi the it would be <esc> :wq
18. Now that you have added scratchbox2 and qemu to your PATH (and in .bashrc as well) check that it works.The version numbers returned might be different but that doesn't matter it's the fact that you actually got the version numbers that confirms that the PATH environment variable is set correctly.
19. change to the rootfs directory
20. before we can use the seed rootfs inside scratchbox2 we need to change the owner, group and permissions so that it is read/writable by our non-root account. When I installed Ubuntu into the VM I was asked to make a default user. In my case I called it raspberry and gave it a password of password. You might have called your default user something different replace raspberry in the following lines with your user name.
21. There is just one more thing to do before we can start using scratchbox2. We need to initialize it. While inside the the seed rootfs directory. In this case rootfs_f14sb2-init actually has a lot of options you can use but in most cases they just complicate matters and for our needs the above command line is good enough. What it actually means is configure scratchbox2 to create a target called raspberry and use the toolchain binaries that we have installed in

    $HOME/raspberry_pi_development/arm-2011.03/bin

    As you get more familar with scratchbox2 you might want to experiment with things such as having multiple targets with a single scratchbox2 installation etc.

22. After a short wait your screen will look something like this
23. You are now ready to start using scratchbox2 to compile software. However, I do a few more things just to make life easier that you might also want to do. I create a directory called $HOME/build, install an ssh server and apache2 and put a symlink of the build directory in the apache2 directory tree. This allows me to keep all my ARM binaries an source seperate from anything else and lets me get them out of the VM easily although I could also use shared folders but I prefer using a webserver as then any machine on my network can access them. I got a bit bored doing the screenshots and cutting out the relevant parts so here is a video of me doing this final bit of setup

    Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have got this far you are now ready to start building software for the Raspberry Pi. As a test I create a C hello world program and check that it compiles and runs both in the host os and also inside scratchbox2 and if that works then I check that the seed rootfs's package manager works. If both do then i'll start using the vm. Again because I am bored with doing screenshots here is a short video of that process.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When and if I get time I might do some more blog posts about some advanced scratchbox2 and qemu usage, tips and tricks but for this post i say

THE END

 piix4_smbus 0000.00.07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade bios or use force_addr=0xaddr

and you'll want to fix that before doing anything else. The Fedora16 VM doesn't produce this error so Fedora users can skip straight to the guest addition installation instructions. I wrote a short post about this error last year but to save you having to go there to read that post the fix [Credit for that fix goes to http://finster.co.uk & Karl Foley] is:

• Start a terminal
• sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
• Add the line blacklist i2c_piix4 to the end of the file and save
• sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
• sudo reboot

There are just a couple of things you need to do before installing guest additions. No matter which distro you have chosen as your guest os for your Virtual Machine.

1. Use your distributions update manager to install any updates released since the installation iso was created.
2. install (if they haven't already been installed) gcc, kernel headers and other essential tools and utilities that compiling C programs require for your distribution. In Debian or Ubuntu  you would open a terminal and type

   sudo apt-get install build-essential

   Fedora uses a program called yum instead of apt so for Fedora the command would be

   sudo yum install gcc kernel-headers

   [sudo allows you to run a command as root without actually knowing the root password if you have been authorized to do so. In Debian and Ubuntu the user you created at installation has already been authorized. in Fedora and other distributions this might not be the case so you'll have to lookup how to do this in the distributions documentation or on google or bing or your favourite search engine.]

When that has completed you should have a screen looking vaguely similar to the one below.
Click in the menu item labeled Devices
Select the Install Guest Additions menu entry
After a few seconds a CD icon will appear on your desktop and a dialog asking if you want to autorun the CD will popup
Click the OK button and a new dialog will openA final dialog will popup asking you to enter your password
Enter your password and click the Authenticate button and after a few minutes you have a screen that looks similar (exact on Ubuntu, vaguely the same on Debian and Fedora and other distributions) to the following screenshot
Press enter to close the terminal. Right click the CD icon on the desktop and click ejectthen reboot your Virtual Machine.

If everything went to plan then you'll now have a working VM with the ability to cut & paste between it and your host operating system, USB support, better graphics support (larger screen resolutions and 3d/2d acceleration...), shared folders between the VM and the host os and a few other bits and bobs. It is also now I do things like disabling the screen saver in the VM and changing the desktop and gdm wallpaper/splash screens but as they don't affect the purpose of the VM I won't document how to do that but will leave that for the user to discover how to do it.

This post was going to continue to the completion of the VM with Scratchbox2, qemu and a seed rootfs installed and configured but this post has gotten rather long so actually stop this post here and complete everything in a following post.

However, almost immediately after posting that I started to receive tweets and PM's asking me not to stop working on the VM or to at least write detailed instructions on how to create your own VM for Raspberry Pi (or other ARM based devices) from scratch. Yesterday I also finally managed to get SDL programs working correctly, not that I had actually tried that hard previously as the majority of software I was personally interested in building and porting  to the Raspberry Pi are text based and at most use ncurses. So although I really won't have time to work on upgrading, tweaking and maintaining the VM personally I have decided that it should continue to live in the form of detailed instructions on how to create your own Raspberry Pi development VM, which is almost mostly transferable to other ARM based devices as well, it's actually pretty much transferable to any device that qemu will emulate but that is beyond the scope of this how-to.

1. If you don't already have Virtualbox and the Extension pack installed then you'll need to download it from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads, choosing the correct one for your platform and also download the Extension Pack from the same page if you haven't already installed it. Once you have downloaded and installed Virtualbox+Extension pack  for your platform move on to step 2.
2. Now you'll need to decide which Linux distro you want to use for your VM. I suggest Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. You can use any that you want but those are the only 3 that I have any personal experience with for installing and using Scratchbox2. When you have decided download the installation iso for that distro. I'm going to use ubuntu in this guide as although Fedora and Debian work and works well they do require a bit more setup for Scratchbox2 than Ubuntu. You can download the Ubuntu iso from http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
3. Once you have the Ubuntu iso downloaded, start Virtualbox and create a new Virtual machine by clicking the New button. Virtualbox will then start the Virtual Machine Wizard.
4. Give your VM a name. I suggest something like RaspberryPi Development. Choose Linux & Ubuntu from the dropdowns (or if you are not going to use Ubuntu as the guest os then select whichever distro you are going to use). It should look something like this 
5. Choose the amount of memory to allocate to the VM. I normally just accept the default. Ubuntu normally asks for 512MB, Fedora 738MB and Debian is normally 384MB 
6. Create a virtual harddisk.
   choose VDI
   Dynamically allocated
   Make it at least 16GB big
   Click the Create button
   After clicking the Create button another dialog may popup and give a summary of the settings you asked for. if it does click the Create button on that dialog. You will then be returned to the main Virtualbox screen
7. With the VM you have just created highlighted click the Settings button.
8. You can leave most of the settings as their default settings. The only setting you MUST change is storage.The storage settings screen may look slightly different to the above as your Virtual harddisk may be on the emulated IDE controller. Personally I prefer it to be on the emulated SATA controller as it seems to be faster and less resource hungry but it's entirely up to you and YMMV but for the basis of this guide it doesn't matter which it is on.Click the little CD icon and add the iso you downloaded earlierClick OKthen click Start
9. You may now install your choosen Linux distribution as you normally would.

This ends part one. When my copy of Ubuntu has installed i'll post part two which will cover installing guest additions and installing and configuring scratchbox2, qemu and a seed rootfs.

In a few weeks we'll have our sticky paws on the real Raspberry Pi hardware which on the whole will obsolete the current VM. I could build sbrsh/sbrshd (mount nfs on the real hardware and use that for cpu transparancy, currently using qemu) which might be useful and there are a couple of tiny buglets and uglyness that I could fix but as it takes about 4 hours to create and clone the vm and configure everything and about 8 to 10 hours to upload somewhere using  ALL my upstream bandwidth is it worth it?

I don't mind continuing with the VM if anyone else really wants/needs it but if it's only me that is using it then i'll probably not bother as the VM is good enough for a few more weeks until i/we have the real hardware and i'm kind of running short of tuits for anything that isn't related to a couple of projects i'm currently working on at the moment  that will enable me to afford the odd raspi, one, three, fifteen...., but I don't want to leave anyone in the lurch if they really use the VM and would prefer not to have to set it up themselves or don't know how to do it.

So can i have a show of hands in the comments of who would like me to do another release of the VM and/or add sbrsh/sbrshd.