First day with a new Raspberry Pi

My Raspberry Pi arrived today. I have some vague ideas of what to do with this tiny computer, but the list of things I have to learn (or relearn) is very long. Nevertheless, I successfully booted it and have briefly played with it through a command terminal session and through a GUI.

The standard “getting started” instructions say to hook up a HDMI monitor, USB keyboard, and USB mouse. That wasn’t very appealing to me—too much work trying to free up a monitor (or trying to work on the Raspberry Pi in front of the 46″ TV screen). So I downloaded Adafruit’s Occidentalis 0.2 Linux distro that is preconfigured with sshd and avahi (Bonjour client identifying as raspberry.local) on boot. Followed directions on how to load this image onto a 4GB SD card using Mac OSX, installed the card into the Rasberry Pi, hooked up an ethernet cable, and plugged in the power supply. The on-board LEDs flickered like it was booting.

I started a terminal session on my Mac:

RivendellPrime:/ phil$ ssh -l pi raspberrypi.local
pi@raspberrypi.local's password: 
Linux raspberrypi 3.1.9adafruit+ #10 PREEMPT Thu Aug 30 20:07:05 EDT 2012 armv6l

This logged me in as user pi. After playing around for a bit, I decided to try to get a graphical user interface running.

To get that going I needed a VNC server, so entering sudo apt-get install tightvncserver downloaded and installed ‘tightvncserver’ on the RPi. Firing that app up on the RPi, I then ran the ‘Chicken’ VNC client on the Mac giving the raspberry.local name and its password, and up popped the GUI window for the RPi on my Mac. Sweet!