Welcome, fellow pranksters and mischief-makers, to the beginning of your journey towards a stealthier lifestyle. Naturally, you're all anxious to get started with this cool stuff, so we'll only devote this first, short chapter to the basic steps you need to get your Raspberry Pi up and running.
First we'll get to know the hardware a little better, and then we'll go through the installation and configuration of the Raspbian operating system.
At the end of this chapter you should be able to connect to your Raspberry Pi over the network and be up-to-date with the latest and greatest software for your Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized computer created by the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation in the UK. It all started when a chap named Eben Upton (now an employee at Broadcom) got together with his colleagues at the University of Cambridge's computer laboratory, to discuss how they could bring back the kind of simple programming and experimentation that was widespread among kids in the 1980s on home computers such as the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64.
After several years of tinkering, the Foundation came up with two designs for the Raspberry Pi. The $35 Model B was released first, around February 2012, originally with 256 MB of RAM. A second revision, with 512 MB of RAM, was announced in October 2012 and around that time the Pi hardware assembly was moved from China to Sony's facility in the UK. The $25 Model A is expected to go on sale in the first quarter of 2013.