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It has been amazing watching what people have done with the Model B. I'm actually considering picking one up just to play around with web development and all th

It has been amazing watching what people have done with the Model B. I'm actually considering picking one up just to play around with web development and all these mysterious languages I hadn't heard of before reading Hacker News, ie the *.js languages, and a personal trial of Django vs Rails.

reitzensteinm 14y ago
Your current computer almost certainly will run a Linux virtual machine with more than enough performance to try out Django, Rails, Node and more, for free. It'll also be much closer to the kind of environment you would likely deploy on (64 bit x86 vs 32 bit ARM). That's not to say you shouldn't get a Raspberry Pi, quite the opposite - just don't let the lack of one stop you from doing what you want, today!
- NoPiece 14y ago
  Good advice - might be worth just trying a micro EC2 instance from Amazon, which is part of their free tier. http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/
  - andrewf 14y ago
    Micro instances have savage CPU throttling with a little bit of leeway. What this translates into is you'll compile something biggish (eg node.js), things will seem fine for a few minutes, then the machine appears to freeze. * If you want to keep a machine around that you know doesn't do much, it's the cheapest option on AWS. But it's no fun if you're doing unplanned, interactive work. Even for the first use case, you want to fire up a bigger instance to do things like package installation, then restart as a micro once its configured. (* I experienced this a year ago. Others report similar things.)
  - niggler 14y ago
    Microsoft BizSpark (free for startups, http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/) gives quite a bit of azure access (http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Azure/Default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Azure/Default.aspx) to let you run multiple virtual machines. HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098

reitzensteinm 14y ago

Your current computer almost certainly will run a Linux virtual machine with more than enough performance to try out Django, Rails, Node and more, for free. It'll also be much closer to the kind of environment you would likely deploy on (64 bit x86 vs 32 bit ARM). That's not to say you shouldn't get a Raspberry Pi, quite the opposite - just don't let the lack of one stop you from doing what you want, today!

NoPiece 14y ago
Good advice - might be worth just trying a micro EC2 instance from Amazon, which is part of their free tier. http://aws.amazon.com/free/ http://aws.amazon.com/free/
- andrewf 14y ago
  Micro instances have savage CPU throttling with a little bit of leeway. What this translates into is you'll compile something biggish (eg node.js), things will seem fine for a few minutes, then the machine appears to freeze. * If you want to keep a machine around that you know doesn't do much, it's the cheapest option on AWS. But it's no fun if you're doing unplanned, interactive work. Even for the first use case, you want to fire up a bigger instance to do things like package installation, then restart as a micro once its configured. (* I experienced this a year ago. Others report similar things.)
- niggler 14y ago
  Microsoft BizSpark (free for startups, http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/) gives quite a bit of azure access (http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Azure/Default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Azure/Default.aspx) to let you run multiple virtual machines. HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098