I gave my son a Raspberry PI this year for Christmas to see if he could make it do anything.
First a couple of notes. Sometimes the HDMI output can not be plugged into a DVI convertor on older monitors. I’ve so far connected it to four seperate screens (two fairly new TVs with HDMIs), one old monitor with DVI/VGA connectors and an older LCD TV with DVI/VGA connectors but no HDMI. The older monitor doesn’t seem to be able to cope without the output signal so just be careful there.
The other setup stuff I’ve had to do so far to get him up and running are:
Install the Raspian OS (based on debian), the SD card that came with it had several options, but we picked this one. The we did the following to fully update it:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
…and then we installed the tightVNC web server so we could access it remotely.
apt-get install tightvncserver
So now once we’ve booted up to the raspberry pi and SSH’d to it using putty, we run a simple command to kick off the VNCserver:
tightvncserver -geometry 1000x600 -depth 16
Then easy-peasy using our VNC Client from anywhere on the network, we go to 192.168.1.19:1 and bingo! A remote desktop to Raspberry Pi.