I got my Raspberry Pi!  Now what?!

The backlog has cleared, bulk orders are now being accepted, and for about 35$ + shipping us Canadians can now get their hands on a Raspberry Pi (RPi).  What exactly is RPi?  The short answer is a low cost Linux device that promises to be very hackable, very accessible and very much aimed at getting kids interested in computers and programming.  

I got mine two weeks ago now and I'm finally kicking the tires. I plan on documenting the more interesting projects I'm going to tackle but first off I just wanted to document some WiFi testing I did with the device.  For right now I just want to basically document that the WUSB600N USB-N WiFi dongle works out of the box with the newest distribution of the Raspian Debian distribution

I'll skip the intro part about how to load up an Operating System on an SD card.  The eLinux wiki has a great how to.  In fact it is a pretty basic and quick process.

Steps

Since the dongle needs lots of juice to run I had to plug it into a powered USB router to run.  (In fact plugging it in directly to the board didn't work)  After bootup running

lsusb

showed that the device is there and recognized:

I wanted to use a graphical network manager so I installed WICD. It is fairly lightweight but it has enough features so that you don't need to modify config files directly.   That was accomplished with:

sudo apt-get install wicd

Now under the Internet menu there was an icon for WICD.  Once you fire it up and hit Refresh you get a view of available wireless networks.

I tethered to my phone and used WPA2-PSK authentication.  (Clicking on Properties allows you to add the required password)

After what felt like forever the RPi connected and grabbed an IP.  

The firmware has out of the box support for WEP (does anyone use that still?) plus a whole slew of WPA-PEAP, WPA-LEAP configurations. Now I'm off to hopefully contribute to the eLinux Wiki to add this dongle to the confirmed hardware list.

Up next for me and RPi... Not sure, but it might end up being a battle of the XBMC's.