Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Review
Software Compatibility
As this is a new Raspberry Pi, I expect we will encounter some minor issues – but if past experience is any indication, they will be fixed quickly.
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Common Applications
I was pleased to see that LibreOffice and scrot (screen capture) were already installed.
I installed some of the other software I use regularly:
- sudo apt-get install gedit
- sudo apt-get install xrdp
- sudo apt-get install remmina
I did not have any issues with gedit / xrdp / remmina – they just worked.
I cannot say the same about chromium:
- sudo apt-get install chromium
Resulted in “No install candidate in default repos”
Fortunately, a quick google, and I found a good article on how to install Chromium – it just worked!
I hope that this version of chromium will be added to the official repositories soon.
Multimedia
With the Epiphany browser, embedded 360p and 480p videos were viewable, and 720p full screen playback was stuttered badly.
Unfortunately YouTube did not work well enough in Chromium, stuttering pretty much the same as Epihany did.
Kodi
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The latest version of Kodi is very easy to install
sudo apt-get install kodi
Unfortunately it simply does not play video with the default GPU 64MB memory allocation.
128MB was not enough, causing the menu’s to be rendered incorrectly.
Not to worry, simply raising the GPU memory to 192MB in raspi-config gets Kodi working.
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The YouTube add-on works great at 720p, once you sign in. Trying to force 1080 through the advanced settings did not work for me.
The Vevo add-on works great at 1080p, and the iTunes trailers I saw all worked well at 720p.
The only real issue I encountered with Kodi is that it often does not return to the Pi desktop when you exit it.
If you end up stuck on black screen on exit:
- press ctrl-alt-f1
- then press alt-f7
This will get you back to the desktop.
Article Index
- Introducing Raspberry Pi 3
- A Closer Look at Raspberry Pi 3
- Feature Comparison, Operating Systems
- Software Compatibility, Common Applications, Multimedia, Kodi
- Hardware Compatibility, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth
- GPIO: WiringPi, pigpio, Add-On Board testing
- More testing: RoboPi, Pi Droid Alpha, SchoolBoard ][
- More testing: Pi Rtc Dio, Pi Jumper, EZasPi
- Benchmarks: Booting & Launching Apps, Compiling GNU Emacs
- More Benchmarks: iperf client & server, NBench, Unix Bench, hdparm, dd
- Power Utilization, Documentation, Support, Conclusion
