Raspberry Pi live coding Lua

A couple of days ago, the Raspberry Pi was announced. Needless to say that this hardware is the perfect complement to the software provided by lubyk.

Raspberry Pi project

The goal is to create a debian based OS (eventually installed on sd-cards) to ease the adoption on lubyk (and Lua) as a scripting platform for RPi.

Why lubyk ?

Lubyk is a very good environment to program that removes most of the burden related to some difficult programming tasks, mainly:

1. Build and installation (not needed with a scripting language).
2. Boilerplate code to connect to hardware and such tasks (not needed by using the provided prototypes).
3. Networking and configuration (not needed because lubyk transparently uses Zeroconf and ZeroMQ for networking).
4. Control and parametrization (lubyk provides easy to use controls)

Why Raspberry Pi ?

Apart from its very low price, this hardware has some very good arguments to serve for educational, low-fi gaming and artistic needs:

1. Very decent CPU (700Mhz ARM processor)
2. Good GPU (supporting OpenGL ES 2.0, full hd and mpeg4 decoding)
3. Small size (less then 9×6 cm)
4. Networking (10/100 RJ45 ethernet)
5. USB (two ports).
6. Good IO (8 × GPIO, UART, I²C bus, SPI bus).

What now ?

Here is a list of the required steps to produce a first OS image:

1. Port the linux-core to linux. [done 2012-03-07]
2. Fix build to use native lua/luajit (remove the need for RTLD_GLOBAL). [done 2012-03-08]
3. Fix build for to make it debian friendly (use debian libs, install location, etc).
4. Build a debian installer.
5. Compile for ARM.
6. Create an empty debian OS with ARM target.
7. Install and setup launch scripts for lubyk on the OS.
8. Test, fix and repeat.

If anyone wants to join into this effort (or has special needs for what should be installed by default on the OS), please drop a line on the mailing-list.