Memorial Day weekend just wrapped up here, which means three straight days of half-hearted yard work, and I'm typing this a little sunburned. But the actual reason I'm sitting down to write tonight is that the Raspberry Pi finally showed up. Like, actually showed up, in a plain padded envelope from RS Components, after roughly three months of checking a shipping status page that never updated.
If you don't follow this stuff closely: the Raspberry Pi is this tiny $35 computer, credit-card sized, made in Wales, that runs Linux off an SD card. No case, no power supply, nothing in the box but the bare board. It sold out in about an hour when preorders opened back in February and the waiting list backlog has been a running joke ever since. I ordered mine the same week everyone else did and I've mentioned the wait on here at least twice already, so believe me, the irony of it landing during a holiday weekend when I had zero time to mess with it was not lost on me.
Anyway. I got an evening free tonight and figured I'd write up the setup since I know a few of you have boards on order too.
Getting the image onto the SD card
The board itself doesn't ship with any storage or OS, you have to build that yourself. Head to the downloads page on raspberrypi.org and grab the Debian Squeeze image (there's also an Arch Linux ARM build if that's more your speed, but I wanted something I could Google my way through problems with, so Debian it was). The image comes as a .img file you write directly to an SD card, not just copy over like a normal file. On a Mac or Linux box that means dd, which is exactly as terrifying as it sounds the first time you point a disk-writing command at the wrong device and have a small panic attack. Double, triple check you've got the right /dev/disk identifier before you hit enter. I did not learn this the hard way tonight, but I have in the past with other projects, and it's the kind of mistake you only make once.
A 4GB card is the minimum they recommend, I used an 8GB one I had lying around from an old point-and-shoot camera. Class 4 speed was fine, nothing fancy needed.
The parts nobody mentions until you're stuck
Here's my actual complaint of the night: the board needs a micro-USB power supply, and it turns out a lot of phone chargers technically output 5V but not enough current to keep the thing stable. Mine kept rebooting under any load until I dug out an old tablet charger rated higher. Nobody puts a giant warning label on this. If you're ordering one of these, just budget for a proper 1A+ micro-USB supply instead of assuming whatever's in your junk drawer will do the job, because odds are it won't.
Also, no HDMI cable comes in the box, and my only spare was in a box in the garage I did not feel like digging through at 9pm on a holiday Monday, so I ended up doing the whole first boot over a composite cable into an old TV in the basement, watching text scroll by in slightly fuzzy standard-def glory. Kind of fitting, honestly.
First boot
Once the power situation was sorted, it booted fine, dropped me to a login prompt, default user pi, default password raspberry (change that immediately if you're putting this anywhere near your home network). From there it's a totally normal Debian system, apt-get works, you can startx into a barebones desktop if you want one, though I wouldn't recommend trying to browse the actual web on it, the thing has 256MB of RAM and a single ARM core, it is not going to load a modern webpage without a lot of patience on your part.
I ended up ssh'ing in from my laptop instead of using it as a desktop at all, which honestly feels like the right way to use this board. I've got some vague plans involving a temperature sensor and a cron job, nothing exciting yet, but that's a post for another week once I've actually built something instead of just getting the thing to turn on.
If yours is still stuck on the waiting list, hang in there. Mine took three months. Worth the wait so far, though ask me again after I've tried to solder anything to the GPIO pins, because that is very much not a skill I currently have.