Hardware
I have the "B" model, with 512 MB RAM and network adapter. To make it work, you need in addition:
- SD card (not microSD); I recommend at least 8 GB and... the faster, the better; I use a 16 GB one
- SD card reader on your desktop/laptop computer, so that you can write on the SD card the OS
- power source - I ordered one with my Raspberry Pi board; it is powered trough microUSB and requires 5V and 1000mAh
- HDMI cable to connect to monitor or TV (it has a "classic" TV output, I didn't test it)
- USB mouse and keyboard
- internet access - I have a router, I don't know if you can set up a connection trough dial-up or something similar
Installation
Using your desktop/laptop computer, you must download the OS. I took the easy way and downloaded the NOOBS version from the official site, here:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
The SD card must be FAT formatted. As my SD card was new, it was formatted using FAT32. I didn't change that and it worked.
The containing files of the zip archive must be extracted to the SD card. Once finished, the SD card can be inserted in the Raspberry Pi board, the mouse, keyboard ant monitor must be connected and the device can be powered up. It does not have a start/stop button, so once you connect the power cable, it will start
If everything was done right, the system will present you a list of available operating systems to chose from. I tested the Debian-based Raspbian and the Fedora-based Pidora. The Raspbian is the "official supported" OS, it has a lot of packages and I think it was a little faster. For the moment I remained with Raspbian and I will refer to that one further.
The Raspbian
The OS installs itself without any problems. At a certain point a configuration window will appear, asking for some basic informations. I recommand that you change the password with your own and to enable "boot to desktop" I also overclocked the board from 700 to 800 MHz (it can be overclocked to 1000 MHz, I don't know if that's OK). I must say I saw the difference between 700 and 800. You can change those settings anytime later by typing "sudo raspi-config" in a terminal window.
Once the installation finished you are presented with the familiar Linux LXDE interface. Before anything else, an update is recommended, so open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
In order to navigate easier trough the package system you may prefer the graphical variant of synaptic
sudo apt-get install synaptic
I tried some more sophisticated interfaces (I use OpenSUSE with KDE on my daily basis) so I installed XFCE and KDE
sudo apt-get install xfce4
sudo apt-get kde-full
They both worked, but KDE is a little too heavy on resources (in my opinion) so it's slower and does not displays correctly all the colors and effects (I couldn't get the OpenGL to work, nor the widgets) so I remained with XFCE. During the installation of KDE I experienced system crash, I don't know why.
FPC/Lazarus
Yes, my primary motivation: can I work on Raspberry Pi? And the answer is... YES!
All I had to do was to install FPC/Lazarus. I couldn't do that on Pidora, but on Raspbian it was as simple as that:
sudo apt-get install fpc
sudo apt-get install lazarus
I copied one of my programs, compiled it and it worked! It even connected to a server using TCP/IP trough a non-visual lnet! I couldn't install the visual lnet component, but the non-visual worked flawlessly!
Next...
In the next days I will evaluate the multimedia and internet capabilities of the Raspberry Pi. I also want to determine how complicated can be to create a program for Android using FPC/Lazarus, since compilation for ARM is no longer a problem.
[UPDATE]
I strongly recommend to disable the screensaver, it seems to be the cause of crashes
[UPDATE]
I strongly recommend to disable the screensaver, it seems to be the cause of crashes
