I started out my Rasberry PI adventure by installing OpenElect to use the Rasberry Pi Model B to be used only as a streamer. OpenElect is a strip down single purpose linux distribution which sole purpose is to run XBMC to be used as a entertainment media center. This setup was perfect, OpenElect is very smooth and very stable entertainment media center. At the time i bought the raspberry pi, I also experimented with the Raspbmc. Raspbmc video streaming was equally impressive, but the menu navigation was very annoying. My guess is that Model B could not cope with the performance requirements for the menu display and navigation for raspbmc. OpenElect in the other hand was very good, menu transitions, and display was very smooth.
Recently i purchased a Model B+ to be used as a printer server for iOS devices. my current networked printer does not support the AirPrint format. So, i embarked on another quest. Installing rasbian on the new raspberry pi was a simple matter, i simply copied, the raspbian wheeze image and used the dd command to copy to the sdcard. once the raspberry pi booted up, i followed the instructions to install cups printer server. I read many blogs on how to do it. so, i'm not going to detail the process here. to my surprise just by installing the cups printer server was enough for my iOS devices to see the printer and be able to print to it. So, i guess that many people had been doing this for a while now, since some of those blogs include instructions on setting up avahi and other scripts to add the bounjour protocol to the printer server. But in my case, it was not needed.
So, i was pretty happy with this setup. however, since i now had two raspberry pi it seems such a waste to leave it at that. so i decided to re-do the new raspberry pi to be both the XBMC streamer and the printer server. An advantage of this setup is that my raspberry pi is always on when something needs to be printed and i would need one less plug. So i started, by installing xbmc on the raspbian. However, i had some problems trying to get the xbmc to start on its own. so then i quickly went to use raspbmc. raspbmc like i mentioned before had some problems when i first tryed it on the original Model B, however, i runs way smoother on the Model B+. so again the process, was very straight forward, copy the raspbmc image, and use the python script to do the installation onto the sdcard.
once that was completed, i went ahead and booted up the raspberry pi, and installation was quick, but require some attention, since there are questions that need to be answered. then i used apt-get to install cups printer server, made the necessary changes to the cups configuration and then went ahead and installed my printer, i must make a note here, since it took me several tries to get it correctly, since there were two printer drivers, i had to select the hpipc vs hpcups.
so, now that everything is working as expected, i'm left with one extra raspberry pi to play around with.
