First Steps With the Raspberry Pi

An anonymous reader writes "The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small, capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise." Beyond praise, though, this article details the hooking-up and mucking-about phases, and offers some ideas of what it's useful for.

Comments

Re:The point?

[Anonymous Coward]

A "cheap china-sourced device" smartphone would not do these things for me:

- Media Centre PC.
- MAME box capable of hooking up to my TV.
- Learning tool for programming, networking, and other computing stuffs (that is also incredibly easy to reformat if you balls anything up).
- Have GPIO ports so I can use it for some silly robotics/mechatronics projects.

Re:A more important question...

[SiggyTheViking]

A flavor of Android 2.3 is better then Debian???

Re:Different markets

[LWATCDR]

Do you want Networking?
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9026 It is more expensive than a Pi.
Wifi? Bluetooth? Well USB dongles can add that to the Pi.
Want to do your development on the board without a PC? A Pi with a Keyboard and Monitor will do that.
Want to play Audio? Here is a kit for you.
http://www.adafruit.com/products/94
Want to develop using Python, Ruby, Basic, Smalltalk, Lua, Perl, Lisp Scheme, Erlang, or Haskell? If it is an interpreted language then it may just be a compile away for the Pi.
There are all sorts of options the pi opens up.
The Arduino is great because of the broad support and community. It is early days with the Pi still but the idea of using Smalltalk for an embedded device interests me a lot.