I Like Pi

So, I finally got myself a Raspberry Pi to play around with and here are some things that I've found.

The first thing I discovered is that there is no point powering the Pi up without a properly prepared SD card. I got mine thinking I had a spare SD card kicking around but when the Pi arrived I couldn't find one. So, I figured I could at least hook everything else up and at least get a POST screen but no, you get nothing, but a red led and a blank screen from your Pi without a properly imaged SD card.

So, I went out and bought a 4GB card for a whopping $6 and downloaded the standard "Raspbian" image based on Debian "Wheezy".

A quick dd later and the card was prepared, inserted and booted up.

Now, what I really want is to run xbox media center so jumped straight in and tried apt-get install xbmc but got an unresolvable dependency error installing xbmc-bin.

Not to worry, I already knew that the proper way to do this is to download the Raspbmc image which has all that stuff already set up for you, so off to their website I went.

On the Raspbmc site you are given a choice, 1) download a small netinstall image which will "download the most up to date version of xbmc" or 2) download the full image which they don't recommend.

So, I took option 1 re-imaged my SD card and booted the Pi up again. The script then went to work and started downloading and install a bunch of things. This took some time because I have a bad Internet connection.

Eventually it finished and the Pi rebooted but got stuck in a crash/restart loop repeatedly showing a message "Relax, xbmc will restart shortly" over and over and over and over.

So, off to google I go and found somebody who had the same problem and "fixed it" by downloading the full image and installing that instead. I'm usually not a fan of net installers so I found myself asking why I'd gone that route in the first place. Oh well, no matter.

So next step, download the full image instead.