My Pi has Arrived!

My Pi is here!  Very exciting.  So looks like I did everything right with the SD card, as it all booted up without issues.  Pictures of my board are here.

My two initial observations were just how small the thing actually is (I know I knew it was the size of a credit card, but it still seems amazingly small when you actually have it in your hand) and the second was how strangely satisfying it is to have a machine which boots to a command prompt.  Though I must admit I did spend a few minutes staring at said command prompt wondering: now what?

A little bit of digging in the wiki found the startx command and I booted into the GUI in no time.  So in terms of the accessories that I had, they all worked with no problems at all, just plugged them in and I was away.  I think I need to change the local to recognise it is a US keyboard, but thankfully I still remember where all the keys are supposed to be so didn't bother changing it at this point.

I didn't have loads of time to play with it this evening, so had a quick go with scratch before calling it a night. Didn't seem to be able to get any sound going, so that is probably the next thing I need to look at.  And for some reason I couldn't work out how to clear the stage in scratch.  But anyway I will leave you with my very first scratch program output:

My Pi has shipped!

Exciting news yesterday:  I got my confirmation e-mail from Newark saying my Raspberry Pi has been shipped and will be with me on Monday!  I'm eagerly watching the UPS tracking site and can see that having started its journey in South Carolina; it left Nashville Tennessee this morning on its continued travels west.

Time to take a look at what else I am going to need for when it arrives.  I'm thinking some new SD cards and a new keyboard and I should be good to go.  If I can get my order in with Amazon today it should all be here together on Monday.

So no excuses for my lack of posting here anymore. Although interestingly I have already been approached by two publishers asking if I am interested in contributing to Raspberry Pi books.  I'm not quite sure what they took from my first (rather brief) two posts that made them think I would be a suitable author...

Raspberry Pis For Sale!

Well that is if you are prepared to buy them at auction and pay somewhere north of $3000 for the $35 device...  The Raspberry Pi Foundation are auctioning 10 of the RasPi beta boards on eBay here.

Check out the video of one of the founders Eben talking about the auctions:



and read the official blog post on the Foundation's website here.

This is a huge announcement for the charity (surely quashing once and for all any mumblings of vaporware) and can only mean that the first batch of ten thousand units cannot be far away from general sale.