Raspberry Pi: first impression

Introduction

Last summer my friend Charlie start to be interested on embedded computer, domotics (home automation) and so on and while drinking a good beer he talked me about an extraordinary small board: Raspberry Pi !
I can say that he was almost crazy about that board. During winter he ordered two boards together with enclosure and power supply and he gave me one of that to make some tests.
In this post I will write about my experiences with Raspberry Pi. From my first impression I think I will write many other posts about Raspberry...Charlie was right...it's an amazing small-PC !!

The board has been well manufactured and it has easy available sockets to plug HDMI display, USB devices and ethernet (RJ45).

Main features:
CPU: ARM1176JZF-S 700MHz
GPU: VideoCore IV
RAM: 256/512MB (depend upon the version: version B has 256MB)

Preparation:

You can find a lot of useful information inside Raspberry forum. Following is my step-by-step short guide to the Raspberry Galaxy...

1) Prepare SD-card
You have to download the last Linux OS distribution from the download section of the official Raspberry Pi website. Current version (March 2013) is called Raspbian wheezy and it is an optimized version of Debian. You need to have a 2GB SD-card and a tool to binary copy the image on the SD card. There are many tools available depending upon your OS:
Linux:
    you can use the CLI command dd (or some other graphical tools that perhaps make use of dd)
Windows:
    you can use the utility Win32DiskImager or Flashnul software (or different others)

2) Plug and Play (almost)
Now, you need to plug your cable (at least the network cable connected to an DHCP server and the power cable) and insert your SD card. Yes...you don't need to plug your HDMI cable or the RCA Jack cause your Raspberry has SSH server enable and you can remote control it using a client (thanks Charlie !). To know the IP address have a look at the lease on your DHSP server !
When you give power to the board a red LED will light and a green LED will blink otherwise...you have something to troubleshoot (ndr. I love troubleshooting) !!
If you are lucky to have your monitor correctly identified by the OS you will get the prompt in a while and you will procede with username and password (default user: pi default password raspberry at the moment).

3) Setup
After your first boot you have to interact with the setup software where you can resize partition (enlarge to fit SDcard), change keyboard settings, time settings, ssh, boot options...
You can recall this tool using the command: sudo raspi-config
We are using a Debian derived version so you can get update using sudo apt-get.
Now you are ready to play for example using X (startx) or ... to troubleshoot like I'm doing about my HDMI configuration!!! This will be the next Post I suppose !!!