I am going to publish a small series of articles on the Raspberry Pi and give setup instructions for the things I am going to be using it for. As much as anything else these articles are for future reference for myself and I hope may be useful to some others too.
This first article details my basic setup of a Pi including setting a static IP ready for it to be used on whichever project I need.
Download and setup Raspbian as per instructions on the Pi site, let it boot up and find it's IP address (I just let it boot and look at my routers DHCP table). Using Putty (or any other SSH terminal) login to your Pi (user: pi, password: raspberry).
The first thing I like to do is to run the configuration utility in order to set the timezone, change the login password and expand the file system to use all of the available SD space.
sudo raspi-config
I like the coloured prompt even when I'm logged in as root:
cd ~ sudo cp .bashrc / sudo su cp /.bashrc ~/ exit
Set a sensible hostname for this Pi. I have adopted a simple convention of colour coding whereby I stick a coloured sticker on each Pi and then name it 'redPi', 'bluePi' etc...
sudo nano /etc/hostname
#/etc/hostname: redPi
sudo nano /etc/hosts
Change references to raspberrypi to your hostname.
Setup a static IP address:
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
#/etc/network/interfaces: auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 10.0.0.31 gateway 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 10.0.0.0 broadcast 10.0.0.255
Restart the device for the settings to take affect.
sudo shutdown -r now
Log into the Pi using the static IP and new password.
That's it for now, stay tuned for setup guides for Node.js and Squeezebox...