I missed out on the chance to order a Raspberry Pi on launch day by a few minutes. No worries though, I could wait. After all, I didn’t know what I wanted one for anyway (although I knew I wanted one). A couple of months later, in April I was able to ‘register an interest’ in a Raspberry Pi. Then in June I was invited to place an order for one. Then on Friday October 5th it arrived! Good work RS! £30 and 6 months waiting well spent!

Although a month earlier I saw that www.coolcomponents.co.uk had them in, so for £25 and 2 days of waiting I actually got one a while ago :)

But on Friday I started to do something with one of them. I installed Raspbmc (the media center thing built originally for the Xbox). If I am honest, I was very disappointed. It was just far too simple! Download a small exe file to a PC, then run it with SD card in. Then put it in a Pi that’s connected to Ethernet and 20 mins later it all just works! Sure, there’s tweaking that can be done and add-ins that can be added in, but 40 mins after I decided to start, I was watching an episode of Firefly. (Most of that time was actually finding leads, power supply & SD card and unnecessarily downloading Debian)

Yesterday I decided to try the Debian image for some real Linuxing! I can’t say I know my way around Linux much at all but some things were vaguely familiar. After about an hour I had managed to install a couple of programs, mount a USB drive and copy files across and run a command line movie player so I could watch the next episode of Firefly (can you see a pattern here?)

And this evening I have set up SSH so I can execute commands from my tablet. First thing I did? Yup, fire up Firefly :)

Have you got your Raspberry Pi yet? If so, what have you done so far?