My Pi Has Arrived

It's Chrismas in July!  My Raspberry Pi has finally arrived.  Setup was pretty easy:

• Standard cell phone charger (micro USB) at least 700mA
• either an HDMI or composite video connection
• USB keyboard and mouse
• Cat5 cable run to my network switch
• Compact Flash card, 4GB, loaded with Raspbian “wheezy” OS

The system booted up just as expected.  I logged on and entered "startx" to begin the graphical interface.  Gave it a test drive.  The processing power is on the low side but still pretty good.  A powerful graphics chip makes 1080p HD video possible.  I am impressed.

Ran the configuration program
sudo Raspi-config 
set timezone and enable SSH

Set the IP address to static (default is automatic)
sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
and change the eth0 section to
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.6
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1
Then restart eth0 to take the change
sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifup eth0

Create a user for myself and set the password
adduser ted
passwd ted

Change the default "pi" user's password while I'm at it.
passwd

Update the package manager and install Samba to create windows shares.
apt-get update
apt-get install samba
apt-get install samba-common
Configured and created the /pihome network share (google "Samba Howto")
vi /etc/sambe/smb.conf 

I am using my preferred development environment on my Windows system and access the files via the network share.  The command line via SSH is used to build it.

I installed the WiringPi library and got the GPIO part working.

My next post will describe the hardware interface I an building - serial port, 8 inputs, 6 relay outputs.