My Raspberry Pi Finally arrives

After a bit of a wait my Raspberry Pi has finally arrived and now I can get down to some serious business with it.
The first thing I decided to do was to create a case. Others had made some attempts with Lego, even Father-in-Law so I decided that this would be my first attempt.
I found some instructions on the web of a version made a young lady. I found her version used lots of Lego if the colours I didin't have. I wanted all red.My box of spares have different colours so our second version  used larger Lego boards to make the case stronger and I lowered the height by one brick to make a more snug fit.

With the box made and connected to a 40" TV I was ready to go.

My version came from Maplins and as a kit came with a keyboard, mouse, USB wireless dongle and USB Hub. It also came with the OS pre-installed. I put on the latest version of Debian Wheezy. I set up the machine to boot into GUI automatically and downloaded geany with apt-get install geany.
I had tried in vain to get on RS Components list to order so I decided to jump ship and get a version from Maplins instead.

Maplins Bundle

The keyboard and mouse are ok - both being only cheap versions the keys are rather poor but are perfectly good enough. The power supply is suitable and saved me having to choose a suitable version and the hub is a bonus and is powered which is the sensible choice for the Raspberry Pi. The OS was pre-installed on a 4Gb Class 4 SD card. As a bonus the Raspberry Pi power supply has two USB sockets so I can charge my phone at the same time. The system came with all the cables necessary to connect to an HDMI screen.

If you want a Raspberry Pi then this seems a great choice. My Father-in-Law bought the bare system and had to buy all these parts and it cost him considerably more.

The quality of all the pars is reasonable. There is only a cheap HDMI cable, but since these work just as well as the expensive versions it is fine. There is no composite cable and this is something that my Father-in-Law would have needed.

The Bonus of getting the OS in the SD card with help many people get started, but I wanted to put on the same OS as Father-in-Law so we could be the same ( at least to start with). I also went for a wired system as the switch is a few feet away.

I tried Fedora 14 on a Class 10 16Gb card. This sort of worked. The card worked fine, and so did the OS booting into a GUI OS but the install failed me because I couldn't get the login to work