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Raspberry Pi is put through its paces (part 1)

The last few days have been incredibly frustrating, but they've ended really well.

We've been expecting a Raspberry Pi for a while now, along with many, many others. Last week it looked as if arrival was immanent - and I promptly developed flu.

But the Pi is here, I'm on the mend, and I am seriously impressed with the board.

I'm part of an international team of geeky enthusiasts working on add-on products for the Pi. When the Pi arrived I was still a bit under the weather, but managed to get it up and running very quickly. (Quickly, that is, apart from the time I wasted because I had failed to note the changed login for the Debian Squeeze image. If you're having trouble logging in, try username: pi, password: raspberry)

So here at home my Pi was working well, but I had half a dozen eager colleagues wanting to explore, in Chicago, London, Bristol and Spain.

No problem. Because the Pi is running a Linux operating system, it's really easy to access it remotely using ssh. I had to open up a port on my BT router, but within minutes I saw more and more of the team logging into the board. At its peak, five users were connected to this $35 computer, and my team-mates were busily installing their favourite software. The vim and emacs fans had to be pulled apart at one point, but apart from that everything went really smoothly.

Tomorrow I plan to start exploring the Pi's GPIO capabilities. It's going to be easier for us all to do that that I thought, because the Pi comes with the GPIO header populated. I'd feared that anyone wanting to use our kit would have to do some soldering. It looks like that's not so.

If you're still waiting for your Pi you have my sympathy. Over the next few days I hope to convince you that it will be worth the wait!

Part 2

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