Don't Panic!

Where to get it

If you have to have it ordered today, you can pay somewhere in the range of $70 to $100 and get it from ebay.

Otherwise you'll have to get on the waiting list at one of

• Newark element14 (US)
• Allied Electronics (US)
• Farnell element14 (UK)
• RS DesignSpark (UK).

The sites go down or are disabled from time-to-time due to the high demand. The sooner you can get on, the better.

You can also run an RPi Emulator which is available on sourceforge.

Accessories If you have your RPi in hand then the next thing you'll want to do is put an image on the SD Card to play with.

I recommend doing the polite thing and downloading via BitTorrent, but nothing is stopping your from being a bit-hogger and sapping the main servers.

If you haven't used BitTorrent before, it's easy enough use with Transmission. * Mac Transmission.app or brew install transmission * Linux apt-get install transmission * Transmission for Windows

Having played with both Arch and Debian, Arch seems to be much much faster, but we can download both.

RPI_ARCH_RELEASE="13-06-2012"
cd ~/Downloads
wget http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/archlinuxarm/archlinuxarm-${RPI_ARCH_RELEASE}/archlinuxarm-${RPI_ARCH_RELEASE}.zip
# or transmission-cli -m "http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/archlinuxarm/archlinuxarm-${RPI_ARCH_RELEASE}/archlinuxarm-${RPI_ARCH_RELEASE}.zip.torrent"
unzip archlinuxarm-${RPI_ARCH_RELEASE}.zip -d ./

Loading the Image to an SD Card 0. Login as root:root 1. Change your password with passwd 2. Create an arch key with pacman -S haveged # generates entropy based on CPU ticks haveged -w 1024 pacman-key --init # must have LOTS of entropy to generate key pkill haveged pacman -Rs haveged

1. Update and install normal packages. Note that you should NOT CANCEL the upgrade to continue the upgrade pacman -Syyu # do NOT CANCEL the current opertation to update pacman first (or any other package) # NOTE: I had to manually replace /etc/pam.d/login with /etc/pam.d/login.pacman after the install

     pacman -Sy \
       sudo \
       openssh \
       fail2ban \
   
     # Add `fail2ban` to the list of `DAEMONS` in `/etc/rc.conf`
   
     pacman -Sy \
       git \
       base-devel \
       vim \
       zsh \
       screen \
       rsync \
       mlocate \
       htop \
       nodejs \
       sqlite \
   

2. Create a user (and make sure to put him in the group wheel), give it sudo, and disable root ssh.

     adduser mynewuser
     visudo # uncomment the first `wheel` line
     vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config # uncomment / update the following line
     # set PermitRootLogin no
   

3. Update the RPi Firmware and allocate 192/64 MiB RAM for CPU/GPU.

     wget http://goo.gl/1BOfJ -O /usr/bin/rpi-update && chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-update
     rpi-update 192
     reboot
   

4. Resize the sd card partition to its full size

     sudo fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0 # note the Start of the root (probably second) partition
     sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
     > d
     > 2
     > n
     > p
     > 2
     > # the number which is the start of the root partition
     > w
   
     sudo reboot
     resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
   

Hardware Hacking

When you get to the point that you want to start having your RPi interact with the world around you, you're going to want something like the sensor pack from adafruit and I'll save you some time by telling you that the links you'll need are right here:

• Low-Level Peripherals
• Verified Peripheral Pinout
• CPU Pinout
• CPU Signals
• Raspberry Pi Schematics
• Broadcom BCM2835 Datasheet (pdf)

Das Blinkin' Lights (how to connect an LED) By default the TTL serial port is setup for debugging (precisely what ctrl+alt+f1 emulates with a desktop system). To use it for communication with something such as a GPS or Accelerometer you need to disable it as a login prompt. See Joshua Elliott's blog post on Raspberry Pi Serial for more info.

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