RaspberryPi

I’ve recently received a raspberry pi, and thought I would let you know my initial impressions.

First the pi is very picky about it’s usb. I don’t know what the differences are, but it apparently only like high quality keyboards and mice.
Second the pi is very picky about power. I had read on the forums about this so I actually went out to get a power supply for it. (USB charger that does 5V, exactly).

The PI’s video can either go through composite or hdmi. I opted for hdmi (the family tv) since I haven’t had composite around for at least a decade.

There are three distros.
The Debian squeeze
The Arch
and the QtonPI.

Several problems with rebooting, and messages about usb’s disconnecting. (The peripherals that I used are ones I use all the time, so I think it’s the pickyness showing up again).

Of the three distros I was able to get two of them working, the QtonI (which in spite of being for developing qt stuff didn’t include X.) and the Debian.
The Debian looks like it is the go to distro. It has X, some games and looks to be generally working.

I wasn’t able to get sound out of the hdmi, and alsamixer wasn’t present so I don’t know what the status of sound is.
Mr. Weber pointed out that this thread has some possible solutions to audio hdmi problems.

It seems that power is the main concern with this board, on the main page they say use 5v 700ma powersupply at least, but in the wiki they say 5v 1000ma at least. I’m using a 5v 1000ma.

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