You get what you pay for

Earlier this week, I posted that I was waiting for a video gadget to come in so I could show you exactly how fast it is to set up a Raspberry Pi.

The postman dropped a packet through my door this morning and now I’ve finished work I’ve been able to put a short video together to show a Raspberry Pi starting up (booting) for the first time.

Only the problem with the video is the quality, it’s terrible.

Yep, the quality is terrible. Which I should have expected, since I only paid £4 for the video converter on eBay.

If you know what you’re looking for, you can see the start up messages for the Raspberry Pi operating system when you run it for the very first time.

After 42 seconds, the board has booted up and is waiting for me to configure it. By the time 70 second have passed, I’ve set the bits that need setting and it’s rebooting into the graphical desktop environment. At 80 seconds, the system is starting up like it will from then on and is ready to use at 130 seconds (50 seconds from the restart).

To keep the system clean, it’s shutdown properly and we’re done. 160 seconds from start to finish!

I won’t be posting any more videos like this unless I can improve the quality but I hope you get a feel for how quick it is to go from nothing to working desktop.