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.

I took a bit of a break from writing this series of posts while I did some work on the development vm which I could do lying down using my eCafe Slim ARM based netbook (ta muchly Obarthelemy) as i'm still in a bit of pain from various aches and pains that being an old fogie seem to bring so sitting down typing for long periods is a right PITB. Now get off my lawn you darn kids. I also wanted to spend some time doing some research for a non-Raspberry Pi related project (although I might try to bring the Raspberry Pi into it if I can at some stage if I can).

So where were we upto at the end of part two? Ah yes The logo competition and MakerFaire NY 2011. i did mention MakerFaire and post a video of Eben's presentation a MakerFaire but I'll expand on that a bit for this post.

MakerFaire NY 2011 was on the 17th & 18th of September and thanks to DigiKey's twitter account  I was able to wangle two free tickets, I actually ended up with three free tickets because  there was one in the Open Hardware Summit goodie bag but I gave the that one to one of my wife's work collegue's who is a bit of a caffine addict and geek.

Eben, Liz and the Raspberry Pi Alpha board (not neccessarily listed in order of importance) were only going to attend on the Saturday because they were on their way to the west coast and were just killing two birds with one stone and splitting a 12 hour flight into two six hour ones and using the layover as an excuse/opportunity  to attend MakerFaire and show off the Alpha board.

So as travelling from Brooklyn to Queens and back again on the subway especially on the weekend is a real PITA and I didn't fancy doing it two days in a row I decided to go on the Saturday.  I didn't want to waste the extra ticket so I  bullied and nagged my son into coming with me and after a lot of muttering under his breath about how getting up at 8am on a Saturday was cruel and unusual punishment and was banned by the constitution and that he'd sue me for civil rights offenses, whose bright idea was it to let him do the constitution law class at university????, he agreed, after I told him there would fire and explosions and stuff,  that it might be fun after all and that he'd come. He's a bit of a luddite, I really don't know where I went wrong bringing him up but he has no real interest in computers other than a tool to do his college work; go facebook & youtube and to watch his anime and read his manga.

[edit for boring bits and skip forward to September 17th at 10am at the main entry gate to a lawn outside the NY Hall of Science.]

Some how or other I, and my son, were first in line to get in although they were about 15 minutes late in letting us in as they had to find the waiver forms that you had to sign if you actually wanted to do some soldering, climbing on stuff or anything that might lead to be you cooked, squashed or  blown up etc. Once they let us in we did a quick run through all the stands and tents to see what & who were there and made notes on where we'd like to spend a bit more time looking and talking to people and went off to the help desk to find out where Eben, Liz and the Alpha board were to be found as on our first pass through I hadn't spotted them. The help desk said they should be in a big tent towards the rear of the area so I dragged my son away from the lock picking demonstration and went back to where the Raspberry Pi was suppose to be. Still no Liz, Eben or Alpha board So I went to one of the other help desks and they confirmed that the Raspberry Pi table was supposed to be where I had been told previously so I told my son to go have a wander and i'd either be at the tent where we were told that Raspberry Pi would be, at the coffee truck or in another tent where there was something I wanted to look at, The CortCyberex AV, as I was due to receive one for my Kickstarter pledge for the CyberCortex AV. It was now approximately 11am and no sign at the Raspberry Pi table, although there was now a table in the space they were supposed to be which was an improvement on the previous walk around. Some of you might be wondering why I was so antsy about the Raspberry Pi as there were lots of other interesting things to look at and do. The main reason was of course to see the Raspberry pi Alpha board in action and to finally meet Eben & Liz but there was also another reason as well. Liz had promised to bring me a 6 pack bag of Twiglets :) I also had a small present for them too.

It was now about 11:15am and as there was no sign of the Raspberry Pi i wandered over to talk to Bryan Pape about the CyberCortex AV and look at some of his demo's for a while and keep an eye open for Liz & Eben as I could just see the table where they were supposed to be from Bryan's table. After talking to Bryan for about 25minutes I looked over and there was someone sitting at the Raspberry Pi table. Female check, looked a bit like Liz's forum avatar check, sitting at the raspberry Pi table with a ruddy great handbag that looked like it could hold a large bag of twiglets check. it could only be Liz! So I finished my currrent conversation with Bryan and ambled over and asked "Liz?" and the currently unidentified female said yes. YAY! a fifth of who and what I had come to see had actually arrived.  I was doing well, I had completed three fifths of my goals for the day, actually a little under as I hadn't yet gone to pick up the freebies that I had coupons for from the Open hardware summit goodie bag.

Liz said Eben had gone off to look for the HDMI monitor or TV they had requested and for electricity as there currently (pun sort of intended) wasn't any available and that he'd be back soon. We swapped presents Liz gave me twiglets and I gave Eben & Liz a Zipit Z2 (a tiny clam shell ARM, pxa270, based IM device that has been hacked to run debian, openwrt...) that I thought they might like to have to mess around with in there spare time (right they have spare time) and let me have a look at the Alpha board by which time Eben had returned.

One of the reasons other than the obvious to see the Alpha board and obtain twiglets, that I wanted to meet Eben & Liz is that it turns out he went to school with someone I knew in the late 80s so after he'd said electricity was coming and the organisers were looking for a monitor or TV that had an HDMI input we had a discussion about how he knew our mutual acquaintance and how I did.

It was now about noon and still no monitor but there was electricity and the Raspberry Pi table was surrounded with people asking Eben & Liz questions about the foundation, the raspberry pi, the alpha board, expected selling date etc.

I might be off recalling the exact time the monitor with HDMI arrived, i'd asked Bryan if any of his monitors had an HDMI input and if he'd got one spare that I could borrow until the one the organisers of MakerFaire were trying to obtain arrived but unfortunately all his monitors were VGA input and if i'd got to the stage where I was going on a scrounging mission it had to be at least 12:30pm probably nearer 1pm when a suitable monitor arrived at the Raspberry Pi table.

Eben quickly plugged everything in and booted the Alpha board they had brought with them and started a movie trailer playing, I think it was the star trek trailer, i was blown away by how good the trailer played. The table now started to get swamped with geeks three deep all asking questions and admiring the alpha board. this went on almost until it was time for Eben to give his 5 minute presentation at 5pm.  The area where he was to give his presentation  had been used throughout the day for other projects to give short presentations and while it hadn't been empty for those presentations it became almost standing room only when Eben was due to speak. As Liz was going to be filming Eben's presentation she left acfaizer and myself in charge of her handbag and the Alpha boards. acfraizer and I did discuss maybe accidently walking off with the alpha boards but decided it'd be too obvious that we had half-inched them.

[i've already posted the video of Eben's presentation but i'll do it again]

Click here to view the embedded video.

As it was now around 5:30pm I once again dragged my son away from the lock picking demonstration and tutorial area, said good bye to Eben, Liz and the Alpha board and we made our way home, with a quick stop when we got out of the subway station near home to pick up chinese for dinner.

I think this is enough writing for now. I promise we'll get to the beta boards eventually I am just too knackered to write anymore today and it's time for my mid morning nap

[Disclaimer: All opinions in this post are mine and mine alone. Although I am a moderator on the forums on http://raspberrypi.org I don't speak for the foundation and any factual errors,  upset I may cause  or spelling mistakes are completely my responsibility]

Click here to view the embedded video.

ok enough messing around with the vm for the time being. it's time to start writing the raspberry pi (part three) blog post.

Click here to view the embedded video.