The Pi Has Landed!

Been busy lately, but I got real excited to see my Raspberry Pi show up this week!  Newark/Element14 shipped it from South Carolina, arrived in a plan brown envelope with no additional fanfare other than my anticipation...

The board in all its glory!

I downloaded the "wheezy-raspbian" (Debian based) recommended distro (at least recommended to start with), loaded it onto a SD card, popped that puppy in, connected a USB keyboard and mouse, added a network connection, then added necessary power (micro USB supply) and video (HDMI; hooked that bad boy up to my 46" Sony LCD TV), and fired it up!!!

After the usual Linux (3.2.0 kernel) boot messages (as you can see, they didn't quiesce them for this distro, which allows for easy checking of how things are going during boot), you get a nice little ncurses menu.  This menu allows you to do usual things, like set timezone and keyboard type, but also contains handy options, like expanding the rootfs to fill the SD card (so, in cases like mine where my SD card was much larger than the image I loaded, users can now recoup that free/unused space leftover on the card as usable filesystem space!).

Boot time!  The little LEDs closest to the bottom are the Pi!

After this menu, you get the usual Linux command line.  I was able to see, via ifconfig, that my Raspberry Pi had DHCP'd an IP address from my router and could name-resolve and ping google.com!!!  I then ran startx to get the full UI up!

This distro uses the lightweight LXDE interface, which looks great and handles well.  Preloaded on this distro are several lightweight web browsers and some "fun" programming stuff (like Scratch!).  I had no problem firing up one of the web browsers (Midori) and surfing around.

The UI provides tasty Pi experience!

I'm looking forward to digging a little more into the Pi's capabilities and figuring out how/where I might use mine!  :)