I like Arch. So I like Arch on the RPi too. The benefit of Arch is that it's really simple where simple means no layers of abstraction added on top of things, no configuration tools, everything is as vanilla as possible. Which makes configuring it a breeze once you know what you're doing. The Wiki is great.
If that doesn't appeal then yeah, go with Raspian. It's based on Debian so it's super-solid and very widely used, has tonnes of packages and there's plenty of info out there.
Some of the laser software can be quite processor intensive (converting an image to a fake raster file, for example), so I think keeping things minimal would be good.
But then I'd also quite like to install XBMC for when I'm not laser cutting :$
aye it's a possibility, would like to keep it on one though if possible. If I can keep some (minimal coms) stuff running in the background and watch videos while the laser completes its job that'd be awesome. Amazon man just brought the pi so I'm going to hunt down an SD card and try it out.
Hmmm. What are you logging in *to*, exactly? I'd assumed from the description that you were just logging in on the virtual console. But 'opening a fullscreen terminal' doesn't make sense in that context (unless you just mean switching TTYs, in which case: don't :D).
Edit: I guess maybe Raspian has some default GUI which starts, which you're logging in to, and then switching to TTY1 with ctrl+alt+f1?
If so, if there's some GUI, find out how to prevent that from starting (since you're not using it).
If not, just use the TTY that it autologs in on. If you want to clear the screen you can just do:
Code:
clear
(You can add that to /etc/profile so that it happens once the login terminal is up)
I've only used Kodi on the RPi so I don't know firsthand what it's like elsewhere but I believe it's the same everywhere. It performs really well (especially given how poorly graphical desktops tend to perform on the Pi).
I use it on my other other Pi, but with the purpose built Xbian build - based on Raspbian, but stripped down to only have what Kodi needs and not a lot else.
It runs very, very well on a Pi 2, and I've also got some other bits and pieces running on it in the background (mainly torrent stuff - I attempted to setup a VPN with it so I could log in to the home network remotely, but it didn't work first time so I gave up and forgot about it :'-D )
Well that pretty much settles it - Arch don't provide an image anymore for writing to my SD card, which means I need a linux machine to install it. Raspbian it is then :C
(A guy has put an image file on Sourceforge, but sourceforge is all kinds of fucked up right now)
Also, I've now fucked my SD card partition table. Windows is too shite to fix it, so now I need to go hunting for a free tool that'll do the job. Bloody windows :@