My Raspberry Pi arrived a couple of weeks ago, but I've been too busy to play with it til now. And tomorrow I'll be too busy with different things :-)
I'd intended to put Arch Linux on it, since that's what I use on my Pogoplug, and it works really nicely there. But, starting at the downloads page (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads) I decided that since the Debian install seemed to have some 'official'ness about it, I'd start there. It pointed to http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup, which contains a list of 'lazy/easiest/easy/...' and so on approaches to getting a card set up.
A link on that page led to a Mac-only (for now) script which downloads and writes an image to an SD card all in one operation - nothing too difficult to do manually, but I'm not one to ignore easy options. Mostly. http://exaviorn.com/raspiwrite/
I'd bought a Sandisk Extreme 8GB SDHC card - which is on 'the list' by the way - for use with my RPi. I ran the RasPiWrite script firstly with Debian, then Arch Linux. Neither worked. No 'OK' LED, only the red Power LED. Somewhat disappointed. As a side-note, the RasPiWrite script worked better if I reformatted (standard FAT) the card between attempts; otherwise it initially considered selecting my external hard drive, which wasn't great - but it did warn and I was aware, so no worries (for me) there.
I then wondered what the OK LED was supposed to indicate, and read (here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=6735) that it should be expected to at least flicker a little on power up - and it wasn't. I had another SDHC card (an old Transcend 4GB SDHC Class 6) and decided to try that. After re-runninge RasPiWrite on it with Debian again, ... the OK light did stuff! It appears to be an SD access light - this wasn't mentioned anywhere I noticed - but it isn't just constantly on when the system is booted, but flickers on activity. So I was sure it was finally booting. I'd read a bunch of things suggesting that as well as dodgy SD cards, flaky PSUs could be a fault, but the two I used (a Blackberry phone charger and an iPad charger) both worked fine in the end.
Sadly however, there was no output on HDMI, butfrom my router's DHCP client list that it was taking a lease. A quick OUI scan showed the Raspberry Pi foundation as the owner of a new MAC in the table :-) I'd foolishly assumed ssh would work out of the box, but nmap showed just port 111 open. Following the instructions here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmMMKojOE4U) to enable SSH worked great. (Basically 'ssh-keygen; service ssh start; update-rc.d ssh defaults' as root), and I could ssh in! Hurrah!
After reading a few places that sometimes the RCA could work even if HDMI didn't, I found an RCA-SCART adapter and magic - it was actually doing stuff! Finally, after searching and finding http://elinux.org/R-Pi_ConfigurationFile and http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=6762 I got HDMI working by (while logged in over SSH) by creating a /boot/config.txt file (there wasn't an old one) containing the following:
config_hdmi_boost=4 hdmi_force_hotplug=1
And that was it - task accomplished.
Since it's listed in the 'working SD card' list, presumably more recent kernels might work with the bigger / faster card I bought for the purpose of running my RPi; IMO it should be a priority to keep images on the downloads page current - containing latest kernels supporting as wide-a-range of SD cards as possible. I'm sure many have fewer hassles than me, and equally sure many have had many more problems. But for this whole endeavour to really work, it needs to get easier. Is RPi about teaching programming, fun, and 'computing', or about the harsh realities of embedded Linux? Fortunately there is an awesome community which I'm confident will keep pushing things forward - thanks!
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