This is the Raspberry Pi, a very small computer that has some great potential in replacing larger desktop computers and use a heck of a lot less power.
I bought one a few months ago and finally got some time to plug it in and see what it can do.
The HDMI video went into the TV, a wired ethernet cable was plugged in, the wireless USB dongle was removed, a USB powered hub was connect and powered, a USB keyboard and mouse was connected, then finally, the Pi power was plugged in.
It booted up quickly into Noobs 1.3.5 and I chose Raspbian as a generic distribution to use. It reformatted the 8GB SD memory card and installed itself over the next 20 minutes, then restarted.
Still works!
Fired up a terminal program, got its IP address and SSH’d in from another computer. Still so far so good. Updates followed with sudo apt-get update then upgrade and 30 minutes later it was uptodate.
We then changed the dhcp address to static, rebooted and all was still good.
Used startx to fire up the graphical shell and still all was good.
Installed a remote desktop package with the commands: sudo apt-get install tightvncserver;
then ran tightvncserver to set the access passwords, then created a shell script to autostart it on boot: /etc/init.d/vnc.sh
rebooted again and was able to use an ultra-vnc viewer from another computer to remotely access the graphical desktop.
Wow! This is all going well!
The next step was to get the wireless usb dongle plugged in and configured and that worked as well.
That was done, then the wired cable was disconnected and the Pi restarted again. Still all is well!
Now we just have to find some purpose for it 🙂
Our first choice is to act as a data logger for our RadioJove radio telescope system. That will require RadioSkypipe windows software to run on linux. We will start checking out methods to accomplish that.