It looks like troubles have queued up for Raspberry Pi, the $25 credit card-sized wonder hobby-computer, which officially started shipping in late-February. After shipping delays and a manufacturing setback caused due to erroneous selection of RJ-45 Ethernet jacks, the hobby-kit faces a new problem. As a high-tech consumer-electronics product, it requires the CE (Conformité Européenne) mark, which denotes compliance with European standards. It is similar in function to the FCC mark that's mandatory for consumer electronics merchandise sold in the United States. The Raspberry Pi team was under the impression that it didn't need the CE mark to ship samples (read: small quantities) of its product, until its big product launch slated for later this year.

In late-February, the first batch of Raspberry Pi shipped out, but a minor production issue soon surfaced. The RJ-45 jack (common Ethernet port) soldered onto Raspberry Pi units were the ones without integrated magnets, leaving these boards without network connectivity. The problem was traced back to a sourcing glitch, and as The Verge writes, is not a difficult mistake to make. To fix the problem, one has to desolder the old jacks, and replace them with new ones. The pin-density of an RJ-45 jack isn't high, and a simple soldering kit is all one needs. The Raspberry Pi team is sourcing as many of these proper RJ-45 jacks as possible to put production of the next batch of these tiny computers back on track.

The season's hottest hobby-kit for electronics and embedded computing enthusiasts, Raspberry Pi, started selling. The device is a fully-functional, self-contained, ARM-powered computer, complete with modern interfaces such as SDHC, USB, HDMI, and Ethernet (USB and Ethernet with $35 Model B), for as low as $25. The device can be powered up using Fedora Remix for Raspberry Pi, a Fedora ARM variant that's heavily optimized for the device. The Raspberry Pi is now available (limited to one quantity per customer), through Premier Farnell or RS Components.

Developers at the Seneca College released a version of Fedora Remix ARM that's optimized for the Raspberry Pi. Fedora Remix is itself a lightweight version of the open-source Red Hat Linux derivative, which is now further optimized for this $25 self-contained hobby-kit computer. The new Fedora Remix variant fits in a 2 GB SD card that the Raspberry Pi boots from. By simply connecting a display to the HDMI port (1080p supported), a keyboard and a mouse to the two USB ports, Fedora Remix will lead you straight to user information screen, from where normal usage is a minute away, without needing any hardware configuration. The 2 GB SD card is left with some space for user data. Raspberry Pi with Fedora Remix works just like any desktop. In related news, the makers of Raspberry Pi announced that the first batch of these boards will be through QA testing by the 23rd, and out for shipping.A video presentation of Fedora Remix for Raspberry Pi follows.

Yes, you heard that right, when completed, the Raspberry Pi foundation will be selling a credit card sized computer running Linux that can plug into your television and play H.264 1080p30 videos. Raspberry Pi is the somewhat cheekily-named UK registered charity which has been set up to design and build a very low cost computer that is targeted for use in computer science lessons in schools, to "put the fun back into learning computing." Why, was it ever not fun?! However, such a simple and cheap general purpose gadget has the potential for many other uses than the classroom, as the world is full of inventive tech-minded people that can tinker with something like this and build innovative projects with them, perhaps by using several of these together.

The product will come in two configurations, a $25 Model A with 128 MB SDRAM & $35 Model B with 256 MB SDRAM and both will come with the same 700 MHz Broadcom BCM2835 media processor featuring an ARM11 (ARM1176JZF-S) core, Broadcom GPU core, DSP core and support for Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM. We expect that in this day and age, most people will go for the 256 MB model, which is still a very small amount of RAM. For those that want to get the most out if this device, the website - www.raspberrypi.org - has a forum and a wiki with tons of technical details on the device, including benchmarks and links to many other news stories & blogs about the product. There's even a shop, although at the moment, it's only selling keyboard stickers of the foundation's logo.