I just managed to get a Raspberry PI with a USB hard drive to self-compile FreeBSD. It took nearly a week!

Personally I think the image looks pretty good. But the PI playing didn't go well.

I couldn't work out how to put the root partition on the external drive. And that's singular, since the mirroring didn't work either; the module version didn't match the kernel. But I managed to stuff /var and /usr onto faster media.

I also need to name these toys. The blue and red ones are azul and rosa. Those I've got on the operating table exposing their guts are daisy and saffron, and the other two I'll call peter and aaron, because I haven't got enough p's or a's.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the time it takes a PI to recompile itself must be down to the slow SD card, so I've hooked up a couple of old USB drives to another PI. I'm going to mirror them, and chuck everything except the boot code there.

I didn't have suitable drives at home, so I've taken the liberty of, um, borrowing a couple I found lying around at work.

And I'm also trying to link an image:

I just managed to get a Raspberry PI to self-compile FreeBSD. It took nearly a week!

A few months ago I received a short, personal email from an unknown sender, asking me if I'd left Manchester. I hadn't then, and I still haven't. But I've got another of those weird emails.

I've kept a copy of it this time, you can see it for yourself. Look closely at the headers. WTF?

Found it! All 6 of my PIs are running the same code, but the latest two don't crash.

If I use the PSU from one of the new ones with one of the old PIs, that doesn't crash either.

It's not a quality control problem with the RPI, it's just shitty power supplies!