Hi, I have just started to download its OS on another machine, is it really so that it takes more than 12hrs to download its operating software and if so is there anything that I should be aware off while downloading it.
The Rasp Pi is really a *very* small computer rather than a Dev board as such. The images used to boot are a port of Linux that is compiled to use the arm processor.
Software has been released to install onto the SD cards, if you see my thrid post down, there is a link to the downloads page of the Foundation (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads. I think that you said you have already downlaoded one of those images. As Coder says above, you will probably have better luck with the Debian Squeeze download. Get that, use the Win32diskimager to write it to the card and you will be ready to go.
You are correct in that once you have used a PC to burn the image to the SD card, there is no further need for a PC. You do not 'talk' to the Pi via a GUI or IDE, you connect it to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and you can program it directly. This can be via the command line, or through a GUI.
Any Linux software that has been ported to use the arm processor you should also be able to use.
