General
So after a while of borrowing multiply pi's, i've managed to buy one. Of course the shipment was delayed so it arrived at a week full of no time. Finally, i prepared all and started the installation, of course an arch linux (like the guy in the advertisement, "what else?" ;-)). The installation was quite easy, i struggeld a bit with the resizing of my partitions. The magic hint, resizes the extended partition first, then you are able to resize the root partition and everything is fine.
After that, i've browsed through the available packages and started setting up the tiny beast. Writing about window managers is a short one, don't do fancy stuff. Notion is working, openbox and fluxbox also. Of course xbmc is running like a charm. But xfce4 and lxde are a bit to much for the little arm. Kde is working better than expected but like chromium, it is far away from running smooth. A nice howto about installing xfce4 on arm arch linux can be found here. Some general beginner tutorials about different raspberry pi distributions can be found here.
What about using known software? Well, you can but keep in mind, it is an arm cpu under the hood. Midori is currently my first choice for browsing the web. If i need something with a gui, pcmanfm is performing well on the pi. Have some minutes left? Read this nice introduction about the desktop world of the raspberry pi.
Other Operation Systems Then Linux
Talking about the upcomming and possible shooting star firefox os, i can only write that i havn't tried it so far. There is a bunch of tutorials out there, like this, that. A list of possible alternative operation systems for the pi can be found here.
What To Do Now?
Well, first i want to try out the media center suitability of the little pi. I like the idea to control the xbmc via an android mobile. I also want to compare xbmc with openELEC. And for the far away future, i want to build zfs on linux on this little box (why?, of course because i can :-D). A git server is also and always an option, lets see. Privoxy, openVPN, tor, the list is getting longer the more i think about it :-).
List Of Links