Raspberry Pi – first runs

One of the main expectations for me on this little device is to use it as a fanless media player. We’ve been using Boxee for quite some time which has a few very good features, all in all accepted by the boss (wife).

This post will be rather technical and list problems encountered and solutions (hopefully) applied in order to get it up and running.

Poor keyboard layout selection
System is configured to use sv_SE.UTF-8 as locale, yet the keyboard is en_* layout.
No solution yet. (Should be easy.)

Monitor/TV resolution not supported out of the box
The native resolution of the family TV, a Sony KDL-40V4220, is 1360×768. This is not available for selection in the xbmc settings menu.
No solution yet.
Status: well, on one of the kids’ newer TV this works just fine but some 15-ish pixels are cut off at each end by the TV(?)

No way to mount NFS shares via menu
All the family’s content is shared over NFS.
No solution yet. (Should be easy.)

Unclear if the remote will work (using LIRC)
I’ve not checked, but this is a must.
No solution yet.

No gigabit
I knew this one, but it’s still bugging me. The move from milliseconds to nanoseconds is just very appealing.
There’ll likely be no solution untill a new board comes out – the chipset/clock on the raspberry pi will not support this high speed I’ve been told.

No DVD playback – no mpeg2 decoding by GPU
According to a thread on the forum, this is because of licensing and the Pi foundation has not invested in this. (And the CPU is not powerful enough.)