It has taken me a long time to get around to finally setting up the Raspberty Pi’s I received over Christmas.
Supprisingly, it was very simple to setup the Pi, once over coming my only real issue. I had some old 4GB SD cards lying around, which I wanted to use. However, it would appear that the official Raspbian download I was working with needed an 8Gb card to install. At this point I sarted looking for an alternative and found minibian, a cutdown version of the Raspbian distribution without the GUI components.
Working from a debian laptop the process started off with downloading the image:
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/minibian/2015-11-12-jessie-minibian.tar.gz
Once the download was completed you want to run a checksum to make sure that noone has tampered with the file, either MD5 or SHA-1:
md5sum 2015-11-12-jessie-minibian.tar.gz
b8546c547cdc8030c3d0bf03af707c1f
sha1sum 2015-11-12-jessie-minibian.tar.gz
0ec01c74c5534101684c64346b393dc169ebd1af
Now convinced that we have the right files, we want to unzip the ISO image.
tar zxf 2015-11-12-jessie-minibian.tar.gz
After inserting the SD card into the laptop it may get mounted automatically. You can see this when you run the df command.
It will probably be mounted to either /dev/mmcblk0p2 or /dev/sdb1. Make sure that the card is unmounted, and then
we’ll copy the image to the SD card:
umount /dev/mmcblk0p2
dd bs=4M if=~/2015-11-12-jessie-minibian.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
sync
Once completed we are now ready to eject the SD card and insert it into the Raspberry Pi.