They need a good power supply, so I got a HTC charger from at £3.96 from Day2Day accessories on Ebay, this was a genuine HTC charger with nice long cable so an excellent product at a good price. Delivery was really quick so I recommend them if you need a Pi power supply.
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Day-2-Day-Accessories?_trksid=p4340.l2563
Added to this I got an 8GB Kingston SD card and my first task was to get XBMC running as I'm keen to check out the Pi as a media system.
This turns out to be very easy thanks to the guys at http://www.raspbmc.com/
I don't think I can commend them enough for their work and installation is so simple it can be done by anyone.
You don't really need to visit their site to download and install the system but here's what I did.
1) Format the SD card as FAT 32 (I use Gparted which only takes a minute)
2) Locate the drive id (type "mount" in a terminal), my card was /dev/sde
3) in a terminal type three commands.
- wget http://svn.stmlabs.com/svn/raspbmc/testing/installers/python/install.py
- chmod +x install.py
- sudo python install.py
You are then asked for the device id for the SD card, in my case I just typed "sde".
This will install a 49mb loader, you're then prompted to remove the card, so unmount it and pop it out.
Install the card in the Pi and connect it to the internet with a network cable.
Power up and it will download and install the files.
On my 110mb Cable it took about 10 minutes to download and install the operating system and files.
Quick reboot and your running XBMC.
Everything works using a mouse which is great, the next step is to look at using a remote control or even perhaps the Wii remote, I had this working on Ubuntu in about 5 minutes and have a couple of bluetooth USB modules so this could be interesting.
XMBC has web control interface as well so all I might need to do is control it through my Android tablet.
Raspbmc have done an amazing job getting the installer to work flawless and the XBMC interface is great.
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