My Raspberry Pi has arrived, and not only is it one of the nice new rev2 hardware revisions, it’s also been manufactured in the UK, which if you’ve followed their trials, you’ll realise is a big deal.

Anyway, mine is here, and one short hunt for a spare SD card later I’d got the installation of RaspBMC, a port of XBMC, started. It took probably about ten minutes to complete, with no intervention from me.

Then I SSHd in (the default username is ‘pi’ and the password ‘raspberry’), and set about installing get_iplayer using these instructions. I had to also install make and gcc before rtmpdump would build but other than that it all worked perfectly. I plugged in my 500GB hard drive and I now have something which:

• is a BBC PVR
• is a good household-friendly playback device for recorded tv, films and music
• can act as an AirPlay server for our iPad, iPhone and iPod touch
• uses HDMI-CEC and therefore responds to my normal TV remote
• can join my local network and play back media from other devices
• probably loads more, I’ve only had a couple of hours!

Next step will be to get a suitable case. Maybe something custom etched?