Says connect to tv, mine is old, how about hdmi cable to external

I believe the Raspberry Pi people will be selling pre loaded SD cards.

I'm not sure if the Element 14 accessory pack or bundle (which comes with a 4GB card) will be preloaded.

There is a download available from the Raspberry Pi website which has an easy to use utility program for copying the downloadable image onto an SD card, though of course you'll need a card reader in order to do that.

If your TV has an RCA socket (red, yellow and white normally), you would be able to connect the Pi directly to the red socket. I assume your monitor has a standard VGA socket (it might have a composite socket as well if really really old), there are converters available for both HDMI and composite output.

HDMI will also connect to DVI and Displayport monitors without conversion but a cable or connector adaptor will be required.

HDMI - DVI cables/adaptors are probably the lowest cost. Analogue video (composite) is also as mentioned an option.

I'm pretty sure once these are available a community will appear and someone will assist you in installing an image on SD card.

I'll help if needed neaerer the time.

Look at the diagram of the R-Pi board; If you want to connect to a TV, on the far side of the board from the HDMI connector is an RCA connector to connect to the Video-In of a Television. This makes the R-Pi accessable to people without a computer monitor, which I'm assuming is the functionality you were asking about. This will give you a display, but without the resolution to be gained on an HDMI-capable device.

You can also run the device "headless" (no monitor at all), and use an ssh program to log into it from another computer, provided you have the "B" version of the board and have it connected to a network. This won't give you the "cool desktop" interface, but it will allow you to work with the system.

The original orders of the R-Pi devices will not include a pre-loaded SD card, but later packages will optionally include this. However, if you already have another computer, it's not that difficult to get an empty card and load your own, and that has the advantage of allowing you to choose the amount of storage you'll have on your system. The required size is 2gig, meaning that the system will fit there. But I'm not sure how much room that will leave you to work with it afterward. I've already built a 16gig card which is sitting here ready and waiting for my R-Pi to arrive. This will give me room to install additional software and create files of my own to experiment with.

There are instructions on the Raspberry Pi site describing how to install the Fedora image, and a very handy utility for doing it on Windows. (It's actually even simpler on Mac; just one command.) There are plenty of folks here and on the Raspberry Pi site willing to help and to answer specific questions, but give it a try and see how far you can get.

Worst case, depending on where you are, I'm sure that someone would be willing to let you mail them an SD card and install an image for you and mail it back to you. If you're in the US, i'll do it for you. Contact me off-list if that would help.

I'll second's Robert's offer above if you are in the UK.

Thank you all, I am in the US. I have a laptop computer, and it currently is connected to a 20+" external monitor by hdmi cable.

Then you don't need the TV.

Attach the Pi to the monitor using hte HDMI cable.