I felt like doing a better report on my Rasperry Pi and therefore I'll focus on my own guide for getting started.
First off you'll need a Raspberry Pi, you can order them from RS Components or Farnell. I hear RS Components is taking open purchases now so Raspberry Pis wont be hard to come by soon.
Now that you have a Raspberry Pi you will need a few items to get going. If you want to play it safe you might want to check out the list of ones that have proven to work at the Raspberry Pi Wiki ( http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals ). At the very least if you arent adventurous I'd make sure the stuff you use is on the list of working ones or at the least not on the list of problems peripherals.
1: Power Supply (AKA. Phone Charger for most) - Must be able to provide 5V/700mA to the Raspberry Pi by way of it's MicroUSB port.
2: USB A to Micro USB Cable - The cable that goes from power supply to the Raspberry Pi Micro USB port. This port doesnt take any data only power.
3: SD Card Reader - So you can image your SD Card. Many laptops have these included. I purchased a USB SD Card reader so I could use it on any machine.
4: SD Card - Make sure it's not one of the probem cards.
5: USB Keyboard - Should be a simple one, no gaming keyboards or media keyboards with extra keys.
6: USB Mouse - Again apply the KISS principle. A cheap plain one will work better than one with fancy addtions.
7: Ethernet Cable - To connect to your router and get to the internet. Wifi Dongles tend not to work because they take too much power.
8: The guts to make mistakes and learn from them! ;)
Optional Items
1: Powered USB Hub - To attach Wifi Dongles and other high power devices to.
2: HDMI Cable - If you dont have one already.
3: HDMI to DVI Adapter - If you intend to hook your Pi up to a monitor without an HDMI Input. VGA users are out of luck.
I got myself a USB SD Card Reader because it was cheap ($5) and I could move it between computers easily enough. My Windows 7 gaming machine (using Win32DiskImager) is faster at copying images to SD cards than my Linux Poweered Atom (using dd) but that's probably because it's got a beefier processor and such. My gaming machine can copy a 2GB Image in about 1 minute while my Atom machine can copy it in about 10 minutes. Regardless my Linux machine is much better for adjusting partitions. I am particularly fond of gparted. It makes things so much easier than command line and no worries about killing my hard drive. I know my SD Card reader will show up as /dev/sdc on my machine (sda = SSD and boot partition, sdb = Conventional 2TB Drive). It is ideal to make the changes to the partition table BEFORE you boot your pi for the first time as it will save you some headaches. I've tried adjusting partitions afterwards and it wouldnt work right. As well I tried using the Pi to resize the parttion itself and had similar issues.
Now that you got everything ready you will plug everything in leaving the power for last. You will need to use a TV or monitor or something to see what you are doing. The first time you boot your computer will do a bunch of things then reboot itself.
The first thing you are going to want to on your first boot is to reset your password with the 'passwd' command. After that you are going to want to update your firmware. Given that your firmware is kept on the SD Card it's a very easy procedure. I found Hexxah's rpi-update tool ( https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update ) to be very helpful. You will need to do the ca-certificates command first to get it to work and run the commands as root. Not only does it update your firmware but it also enables you to select the split of RAM between your general purpose RAM and your GPU. I use 224mb to RAM and 32mb to GPU personally because I'm running it as a headless server. Updating the firmware should solve many problems that you may encounter later on.
Now you will want to copy over the setup that enables you to run the Raspberry Pi as a headless server so you will use 'sudo mv /boot/boot_enable_ssh.rc /boot/boot.rc'.
Now it's time for you to have fun with your Rasperry Pi and see what you can get it to do! I know I'm already thinking of possibilities as I await my new Powered USB Hub.
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