My Pi has landed. I have fired it up and it is all working well. I have gone for Debian Linux. The desktop is there and it has plenty of programs/apps (what do you call them nowadays?) to get you going. There are several programming apps. My current idea is to turn it into a music server. You can get audio out of the HDMI but I am not sure how this will prioritise with video. There is also a 3.5mm jack.

Quite amazing for the price.

Yes and thank you for the fill in.

It isnt as complicated as you could fear. The operating system can be ordered pre-loaded on an SD card and the system will boot (start) off the card. To get the Pi going I inserted the preloaded SD card, connected a USB mouse and keyboard, connected the power supply (a standard phone charger micro USB connector) and connected a monitor (aka a TV) via its HDMI connector. There is no on switch and it just fires up when the power is connected. On the screen you see scrolling text as the system loads its operating system. When this stops you are asked for a log in (this was supplied with the paperwork) and at a prompt (ie after the log in the system was awaiting my command!) you type "startx" and a Windows-ish desktop appears.

From here you double click to open the various applications. They take a little longer than a modern PC but this is a £20 card. To get it working as a server I need to make the Pi recognise the HDD it have my music on. This is some simple code you can copy off tinterweb, only a couple of lines (this is where you start to learn coding!). You will also need to load some media player software from the internet, again compatible programs are recommended on the web. The Pi allows access to the internet so you can browse to find this information.

Will it sound any good? probably not but you can get everything working for about £60 and you will have done it yourself. Are there better ways of learning programming? yes but this offers so much for so little. There are endless books and programming tools around but this is a neat way of doing things. (I can also recommend an Arduino for learning programming with a "real" system. I run a speech synthesiser from mine. Again simple using premade blocks and modifying existing code to try to get the unit to swear synthetically).

There is a small cottage industry growing up around the Pi. There are suppliers of cases, 3-D printed cases etc. Although newer versions will have cases. I think a lot of people will buy them and realise getting them going isnt quite what they thought and leave them in a drawer. The Pi is a massive advance over the ZX80's and ZX81's I had to try to start with in my youth. Here you had to copy manually program code and I was put off for a long time. Give yourself a simple task like I have and you might find a use for the unit.

Edited by user 28 June 2012 10:58:38(UTC)  | Reason: spellin

I am not planning anything too serious for media, it is only digital after all. A few CDs is my version of media!!