First impressions of the Raspberry Pi

So my Raspberry Pi has finally arrived and I had to get a quick post out. The first thing you notice about the board is how small it its. It’s smaller than an iPhone and in some ways it feels a little fragile, I think is because there is no case it feels a little vulnerable but I don’t think it’s a real problem.

The first thing you will need to do is get hold of an SD card, I used a 16gb card. You will then need to download one of the install images from Raspberry Pi site, I download the standard Debian image file. You then need to get that image onto the SD card, to do this you will either need a unix tool called BB or for Windows for a tool called Win32Diskimager. At first on my Windows 8 machine this tool appeared to work but when I booted up the Pi I didn’t get anything on the screen and was concerned that there may be a fault on the board but I tried redoing the image with a Windows 7 machine and this worked ok. 

I connected up the Pi to my network and a USB keyboard and mouse and booted up the Raspberry, it very quickly boots up and you can log in.  After I got it up and running I swapped the keyboard and mouse for an old wireless keyboard mouse devices and that worked fine. From the command line you can start the LXDE the graphical user interface which has the Midori web browser, development tools and even a music player. Overall the UI feels a little sluggish but its useable and the browser works well on most sites but it doesn’t support HTML5 or Flash so no video playback on it yet, there are other images that you can download and there is even a XMBC version for it  and I think I will end up with a couple of SD cards that I can swap depending on what roll I want it to perform.

Going forward I want to get things like VLC, Fuse Spectrum Emulator and XBMC running. I also want to start programming on it and my kids are keen on giving it a try, for £29 it’s a fantastic device and it’s great to have the play around with.