Raspberry Pi -- First Impressions

Overview

I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi board to play around with its capabilities.  I've used the Arduino boards before and I think they serve a purpose but I wanted something with a little more horsepower that could run apps as well.

Setup

When the Pi arrived I had some initial problems but nothing too major.  When I plugged in the Pi nothing happened even with the SD card installed.  I was confused on this and there was no clear answers online.

It turns out that the installer I downloaded for Fedora Remix was old and I ended up having to download the new installer and newest builder of Fedora Remix.  The newly installed image worked great and the Pi started right up.

I was impressed as well that a Gear Head USB keyboard and a USB mouse I had laying around worked instantly without any setup.  It launched me into the GUI (Xfce) and walked me thought some basic install steps.

Impressions

Running via the GUI is a little sluggish.  I found that browsing the web was a little slower than I would have preferred.  I'm not sure if overclocking from 700mhz to 1Ghz will make a big difference in that regard or not.

I wanted to see if the Pi could render video and attempted to launch some type of streaming video.  Netflix didn't work through Midori.  Amazon wanted to download the Flash player which I started to do but didn't seem to finish.  I will investigate these more.  I will also attempt to run YouTue.

Next Steps

I want to try and get Spotify to stream from the Pi along with testing the GPIO.  I'll see if I can get Netflix or Amazon Instant Video to run and see if it runs well.  Eventually as well I want to use this to stream media from other computers in my household.