Banana Pi anyone?

There are other boards like that, e.g. the CubieBoard.

They seem attractive at first, because they offer more performance and/or additional features at often a comparable price.

However, the documentation is usually severely lacking compared to the Raspberry Pi, also because of the many sites and blogs that describe projects with the Raspberry Pi.

The state of the device drivers also isn't that good.

I had a look at it as the Raspberry Pi media centre I set up was slow and a bit unreliable.

The main problem with the Banana Pi in this context is that hardware acceleration of graphics only works on Android and not on any other flavour of Linux.

The latest version of Raspbmc has cured my speed and reliability issues so I've lost interest.

Another Dave

I'm considering it for a network hard-drive storage. It's got 1G Ethernet and a SATA port. I've seen reports from users saying that they get an average speed of 30 megabytes/s for a Samba-share, which is pretty good.

And it's half the price of a Cubiboard 3. (The Cubieboard 2 only has 100M Ethernet.)

those specs do suggest it would make a good controller for a basic NAS server. web & FTP servers should be quite simple too,

Actually it will, mine is running Raspbian. It's a lot faster, what with the dual cores and more speed too. I'm not a hardware guy but a PiGlow works on it with no trouble so parts are similar. The cases you can buy suck compared to the really nice ones from SD. The default desktop is a disgusting yellow but other than that looks pretty much like a Pi.

I'm pretty sure there is a lot less support for it and a lot less people working on software but since it runs Raspbian you can pretty much use all the same software from the RPi.

I bought it to compare with the RPi for a project I'm going to be working on. We are going to use RPis because of the significantly greater number of users and support (even if it is through forums). I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my BPi but I'll think of something.

I want to get a BananaPro when they come out too.

Really? I haven't used mine for a while because really, the Raspbmc GUI was annoyingly slow and I also had some power issues leading to the corruption of the SD card. I now have one power solution that seems good enough, the charger and USB cable from my LG phone, so maybe it's time to try Raspbmc again...

I had it set to update nightly for months and it was pretty poor so I started a new one from scratch. The improvement was immediately noticeable but I don't understand why the continuous update didn't improve matters.

Try a new set-up and let me know how you get on.

Another Dave

OK, I had a short try on Sunday. Indeed it seems to be a lot faster now and some stuff that wasn't working previously works fine now. I remember I got nothing in Zeroconf earlier and NFS would find only one server out of two.

OTOH, the Pi seems to lose interest in HDMI if it's disconnected for a while, I connected it via my amp to the TV. So if I switch inputs on the amp or TV for something else for a while then the Pi won't respond to the TV's remote any more and sometimes there's no picture either. Restarting xbmc fixes that but it's a little annoying. I guess I'll have to try connecting the Pi directly to the TV to see if it likes that better.