As a few of you know I was very lucky to be one of the first here in the UK to get a RaspberryPi (for those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, its a very small low power computer, look back in the archives). At that point there was a distro but it wasn't the one they wanted to release. Also people were busy cross compiling anything and everything they needed to get things into the package tree.
Don't get me wrong they were certainly fun times for me and many others who were battling with the problems of sund not working correctly with the HDMI connection. Only certain keyboards working with the device and the fact that a lot of the packages were already outdate, such as those that would work with LCD displays so having to come up with different ways of getting it to work. And then after all the hard graft, all the magazines had also been fighting with the same things so gave you all the answers!!
Anyway, due to many reasons, mostly work related, the Pi got moved to one side, not forgotten but way down the list until this past month. I was a winner of a Piface device as part of the roadtest program that farnell run. With a new gadget and the requirement to review it came the need to get the Pi back out of storage, having two and not really know what the state of either is I decided to start afresh. Latest distro release was downloaded (Raspbian Wheezy), copied onto the sd card and the machine switched on.
What a difference a few (lot of) months makes. You are now greeted with a screen (Raspi-config) that allows you to set up all sorts of things before you even get close to the os. The first is to extend the partition to use the whole SD card. The ability to work with wireless cards and the ability to enable sshd and the x interface. There are a good few resources on the internet but when I get a little more time I will hopefully add more of a walk through. For now though, as I run off to test out the PiFace please, even if you think you have no idea about computers but you have the slightest tweak of interest go and buy one. You will not regret it one bit