Raspberry Pi – first impressions

My Raspberry Pi finally arrived yesterday! Here are some of my first impressions.

• I had two SD cards prepared, a blue SanDisk SDHC class 4 with the latest Debian “squeeze” and a Transcend class 10 with Arch Linux (01-03-2012). Both were 16GB, both booted.
• Debian somehow didn’t allow me to use my keyboard and mouse simultaneously. , but I think this might be due to them both being slightly non-standard (my Logitech G15 actually shows up as multiple USB devices due to the display) It looks like this is because the G15 is too power hungry for a Raspberry Pi. I’ll investigate this later, since I prefer Arch Linux anyway  🙂
• Arch Linux felt much faster than Debian, though this may be because it’s installed installed on a faster SD card.
• The Arch Linux image doesn’t come with the familiar ‘ifconfig’ utility, it seems to have been replaced with ‘ip’ (e.g. ‘ip address’ will display your IP address)
• When people say that the Raspberry Pi is “slow”, I think it’s worth mentioning that you should really compare the Raspberry Pi to running Linux from a USB stick if anything, which at least in my experience is “slower” than running it from a HDD. Updating my Ubuntu USB stick to 11.04 took ~5h, and most of the time was spent updating packages, not downloading them…
• The Pi is a very exiting piece of technology to play with!!