Raspberry Pi

Last Thursday, 2012-06-21, the Raspberry Pi has arrived. :-)

The first thing is that I ordered three at Farnell to sell to friends and to share shipping cost. Unfortunately, they reduced the order to a single piece. The guy on the phone explained, that everybody is limited to one device only. So be prepared to spend extra shipping cost.

To play with it, I followed the instruction in the Quick Start Guide. Therefore I downloaded the Debian Squeeze image and copied to an SD card. Then I connected the Raspberry Pi to my monitor, plugged in the ethernet cable, mouse and keyboard and used the power supply of my Samsung Galaxy 3 (note: not S3!) and there we go. It booted like a charm and shows its IP address at the screen.

To access the Raspberry Pi via SSH, you first have to generate a host key. Therefore run the commands

sudo dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

which will also start the SSH server.

Next, I started the X Windows system by

startx

and got the LXDE desktop environment. The browser is "Midori" and the "LXTerminal" can be used for command line interface. I used "aptitude" to install the packages "vim-gtk" for a powerful editor, "fp-compiler" for a powerful programming language and "scrot" to make screenshots as suggested here. Note that the "scrot" package was not available originally, but after changing /etc/apt/sources.list to use the ftp.at.debian.org mirror and pressing the [U] key in "aptitude", it was there.

Most important thing? Write a Hello World! program, once in FreePascal, once with GCC. :-)

So, what next?