Pi Zero

[TURIN]

The other Raspberry Pi threads seem to have died a death so, as the Pi Zero seems to be selling like the proverbial warm scone, have any of you chaps set one up yet?

I bought one for my twelve year old who seems to be developing an interest in coding.

Any advice gladly accepted.:ok:

[ExGrunt]

Turin,

While I think the Rpi is an excellent little machine, especially the 2B, I think the zero suffers from a lack of network capability.

I find I am alway downloading drivers etc so not having an inbuilt network connection is a real pain.

HTH

EG

[TURIN]

Good point, however this will be used as a learning tool (old school) and the like, and I do have a USB dongle laying around doing nothing so that will do for now.



.

[ExGrunt]

Hi Turin,

and I do have a USB dongle laying around doing nothingThat is of course the solution, but IIRC the zero only has micro usb connectors so you need a USB hub to plug in a dongle (which you will need anyway to plug in the keyboard).

So for the small extra cost I would get one of the larger pi's. I have quite happily run a pi as a LAMP server ( For those who do not know LAMP = Linux Apache Mysql PHP) All of which would be good things for someone learning IT these days:

Linux: Operating System
Apache: Web server
Mysql: Database (Although personally, I prefer Postgresql)
PHP: Web scripting

The other thing I would recommend for someone learning is to have a look at Eclipse (Eclipse - The Eclipse Foundation open source community website. (http://www.eclipse.org)) which is an open source programming tool with plugins for just about any language you need to code in.

If you want a really hard core experience you could have a look at Linux from scratch (the book is available on Amaz0n etc) which teaches how to build the operating system from source code and there are a couple of online resources aimed at doing this on the Pi (although you probably need two pis for this).

HTH

EG

[TURIN]

Thanks for the tips.
I have a USB hub (a gift from a training course).

This is all on the cheap as my little one's interest in coding could be fleeting....