We got out 2nd Raspberry Pi this week – possibly a bit premature as we’re still finding our way with the first one. I’d like to have one in the back of the main TV as a media centre, and another one in the back room for the kids to play with Scratch and learn some coding.
I moved TVs and things round and put one in the back room, the idea being that the kids would have more access to the RasPi without fighting over the TV – much to my annoyance, the sound doesn’t work over HDMI on the small Samsung TV. It worked just fine on the larger Sony TV. Looking at the RasPi forums, this is going to be a time-consuming thing to fix. I tried putting hdmi_drive=2 in config.txt – and I didn’t even get a video signal over HDMI any more, let alone sound! I had to use the composite video output to put the config.txt file back the way it was. The Samsung TV seems to be defaulting to 1440×900 when connected to the RasPi and might be in some sort of DVI monitor mode – hence the lack of sound. Not sure I have the time or the patience to try and get to the bottom of this though. I could make a new, clean flash card image and have it do its first run with the Samsung TV plugged in, but that’s a time consuming process – copy the disk image to the SD card on the laptop, reboot laptop with a Gparted live CD, resize the flash card image to 8GB… all a bit of a slog and it might not make any difference.
I did find this essential tweak though – elinux.org/RPi_Debian_Auto_Login – this gets your Pi to automatically log in and start the windowed environment, which is essential to make it kid-friendly. If only the darn sound on my Samsung TV was as easy to fix…