Ever since I saw Becky’s Cables & Adapters for the Atrix Raspberry Pi Laptop video, I have been hoping for the chance to take this rig on a plane as a nice replacement for my more bulky laptop. Well, Becky sent me out on the road with it and overnight last night I took it with me on a Swiss Int. Air flight to Belgium.
These days, between the reading I want to get done on my Kindle and battery life limitations for my personal laptop, a few hours messing around in my Pi is not only enough to satisfy my basic airline computing needs (except serving HD video, which the seatback monitor was willing to provide in large quantities) but my time on the RaspPi laptop turned out to be a great chance to force myself to push at the opportunities and limitations of Adafruit Occidentalis distro. I realized that I have always opted to grab new software rather than hold myself to the packages that come with the distro, but given that I had no option to apt-get anything new I came away more impressed with the decisions the Adafruit Occidentalis team have made for what to include!
Aside from my addiction-level jonesing for Internet (should have grabbed a Miniature WiFi Module, though this flight didn’t have any wifi anyway), this was a great experience that I strongly recommend it to everyone diving into using their Pi. I’ll continue to report from the road my experiences with it.
One thing I noticed on the Swiss Int. Air flight that got me really excited: USB power sockets at each seat! Check out the photo below to see my Pi booting up happily powered by the seatback port. Add a Miniature Wireless USB Keyboard with Touchpad and a tiny display screen, powered via USB, and I could have a airline-ready laptop for writing in the same footprint as a paperback book!
Even better — though it might get you kicked off the plane — patch into the setback display screen to take ownership of your online media experience!
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