Raspberry Pi.... little computer may be very disr

Why a Raspberry-PI (or Ras-Pi. or just plain Pi) looks like it will become "disruptive technology" is that it's a complete computer for $35US.... yes $35. It doesn't have the horsepower of a full size desktop, but for about 80% of what people use their computers for, you really won't notice the difference. That $35 only includes the board itself, you still need to put it into a small box (or make your own) add an SD card (i just saw 4GB SD cards on sale tor $3 and 32GB SD cards are about $20 or $30), add a keyboard and mouse, and a TV (composite will work, but HDMI is better), and a MicroUSB power supply. For such a low price (even after buying all the other stuff) you have a fully functional computer that can do most of what you normally do on a desktop machine (for most of what people do, web browsing, IMing, checking their email, watching videos, we could say that a desktop machine is "overqualified" for the job).
I've been playing with my Ras-Pi for a couple of weeks now, and have so far got it to do many things others use full size computers for. I recommend Raspbian if you want to do much more than use the Ras-Pi as a network media player.
First of all a description of the Ras-Pi:
It's a small (just a little bigger than a credit card) single board computer with:
Power jack-Micro-USB (only the power pins are connected)
HDMI jack (the Ras-Pi is capable of 1080p/3D video)
Composite video out (if you're cheap like me, and don't mind the video being a little blurry)
2 USB jacks (i recommend getting a powered USB hub, but make sure the input jack on the hub doesn't supply power to the Ras-Pi)
Ethernet port 10/100.... the Arm11 CPU doesn't have enough horsepower to justify a gigabit port.
Analog audio out. line level.
GPIO header for adding additional devices/interfaces to the Pi for us hardware hackers.
Serial camera port. the Ras-Pi developers are working on a 40Mpix camera module.
LCD port for addition of an LCD panel display
SD card slot for the boot media

The ARM11 CPU is a Broadcom SOC with a built-in GPU and on the newer B model boards, comes with 512M of RAM.

The ARM11 operates at a 700Mhz clock frequency, but can operate with software controlled overclocking at up to 1Ghz. Read the Ras-Pi warranty carefully, as some of these overclocking settings will void the warranty, but some will not.

As I mentioned earlier, Raspbian is the OS recommended for starting out, but it will require some learning of Linux, as Raspbian is a port of Debian Linux specifically for the Pi. If you are just starting out, I highly recommend you install Midnight Commander, an extremely useful tool. It's a text mode file manager, very similar to the old DOS based XTREE or Norton Commander file managers. MC makes browsing the file tree a whole lot easier than doing everything from the command line (and you can use it to read or edit the scads of config files linux has).
I won't reiterate all of the steps to get Raspbian installed and running, as all of that is covered here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

All command line commands are entered from a Terminal window. Double-click the LXTerminal icon on the GUI, and you get a command line terminal. If you're using a composite TV like i am, you will want to re-size the window vertically shorter, so you can see the command prompt at the bottom (it should look like "pi@raspberrypi ~ $" with a white cursor).

Before installing any new programs (like mc) you may want to set up a password for the user "root" (the absolute top-dog ruler of any linux system)...

sudo passwd root 

apt-get install programname

apt-get install mc