For my birthday a good friend got me a Raspberry Pi. It took three months, but I finally received the raspberry pi in the mail this week. After spending time reading through performance reports on SD cards, I ordered the SanDisk Extreme Pro 8GB. Once it arrived I used my Ubuntu machine to download the Raspbian “wheezy” disk image and extract the image onto the SD card using ImageWritter. Using an iPhone USB charger I plugged in a micro USB cable to the power input on the Raspberry Pi board as well as an HDMI monitor and wireless keyboard/mouse dongle.
The Raspberry Pi booted to the installation screen. The first thing I did was expand the root partition to use the whole SD card space and also enabled ssh. Then I enabled the display and rebooted. The Raspberry Pi booted into xWindows. I plugged in a live Ethernet cable and started the web browser. That all worked fine.
Now that the Raspberry Pi was working I decided to install Drupal. I opened a terminal and ran ifconfig to get the IP address then started the config screen to disable the display. Now the Raspberry Pi is a headless system that I can ssh into and run command line operations. After sshing in I installed apache, php and mysql using the normal methods. Once MySQL was installed I created the drupal database and set the drupal user permissions. Then I download and extracted the drupal files to /var/www, deleted the apache index.html and pointed my Ubuntu web browser to the IP address of the Raspberry Pi. The drupal installation screen came up and I installed drupal.
The drupal installation seems to be working fine. Its a little slower than my Ubuntu machine, but that's to be expected. My next step is to create a Python script to collect data from the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi and display that data on the Drupal website. If this works out then I can use a $35 Raspberry Pi for my Factory data collection and display.