I’m currently in a small research group to see what the Raspberry Pi can mean for my school. Basically we’re checking out its features and capabilities. Our eventual goal is to create a remote controlled boat with a tracking camera on top of it.
Since Perl is my language of choice I decided to see what’s available already for programming the Raspberry Pi with Perl. It turns out there’s a distribution called HiPi (website) which seems to cover every possible interface the Raspberry Pi has.
Sadly I was having some issues in getting HiPi to install. When compiling the bcm2835 library the build process would fail. It turned out that the configure-process for bcm2835 detected that the files were newer than the date and time of the Raspberry Pi I was installing it to. This is something you’ll only find out if you try to install HiPi manually. When I was running the automated install script it wouldn’t give these details.
Luckily this can be fixed without any trouble. Just issue a date command like this:
$ date --set="2013-06-01T15:00"
Because the Raspberry Pi doesn’t come with a real-time clock it needs some help setting the time. You can also use NTP to keep the date and time of your Raspberry Pi updated, but this requires a network connection.