First measurements with the ALICE detector at LHC

ALICE is a general-purpose detector designed to measure the properties of strongly interacting matter created in heavy-ion collisions at the CERN LHC. Several features, such as lowmomentum cut-off and powerful tracking over a broad momentum range, make it also an important contributor to the proton-proton LHC physics: here ALICE aims both at setting the baseline for the understanding of the heavy-ion data and exploring the new energy domain. This paper describes the status and plans for first physics measurements, in particular discussing the early p-p and Pb-Pb running scenarios and the corresponding physics programmes.