My Raspberry Pi finally arrived yesterday, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting. I ordered it October 24. It was shipped November 20 and arrived on my doorstep November 29. That’s over a month! I had a few hours to play around with it. The first thing I did was placed the Raspberry Pi inside an Adafruit Rainbow Pibow enclosure that I’ve ordered several weeks back. It looks amazing. Here’s it is.

Once it was inside the Pibow enclosure, I downloaded the Raspberry image called Raspbian Wheezy. I loaded it to an old 4GB SD card that originally came with my Nikon D90 camera. Once the image was loaded, I inserted the SD card, connected a USB keyboard, a USB mouse, and a HDMI cable.

On a side note, I’m currently using a 5v 750ma USB adapter, which I know is sufficient, but the Raspberry Pi needs more ooomp with multiple USB devices connected to it. They recommend that you have at least a 5v 1amp power adapter.

Finally, I powered the Raspberry Pi. A blank screen! Not good. It turned out to be just a resolution issue. I ended up plugging my Raspberry Pi to my old TV, via a RCA composite cable. It worked, although a good portion of the screen was clipped. I started the GUI, then accessed the Terminal and changed the screen resolution from there.

I found this page with instructions how to change Raspberry Pi to 1680×1050 resolution.

Edit the /boot/config.txt file.

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Add the following code to the end of the file. 58 is for screens with a 1680×1050 resolution.

hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=58

Reboot.

sudo reboot

My monitor works! All 1680×1050 pixels. I ran an update next by issuing the following commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This process takes a good 20 minutes. Finally, I installed Apache.

sudo apt-get install apache2

Once installed. I checked if the web server works. It does.