Reduce customized Raspbian image size for sharing

[antiriad]

Hello,
I'd like to share my customized Raspbian as a downloadable ISO for a project.

What would be a good (and easy?) approach to get an ISO smaller than the SD card size, and to allow users to resize it easily afterwards?

Thank you very much.

[ghans]

Burn a gparted live CD and use it with your image.

ghans

[antiriad]

Hello and thank you for your answer.

Actually I make a SD-card image with Win32DiskImager (I'm on Windows, but I can eventually use OSX or Ubuntu).

So should I use gParted to open the ISO file?

[d_older]

Hi Antirad,

If its a true Raspbian image (not Noobs)

I've had good results using resizeimage.pl for shrinking backups - from these forums back in 2013 - I'm surprised it's not mentioned more

viewtopic.php?f=91&t=58069

and there is a version on git hub at

https://github.com/mikerr/pihome/blob/m ... zeimage.pl


I would recommend copying the image for the first test as the program replaces the file.

YOU WILL HAVE TO MANUALLY EXPAND THE FILE SYSTEM ON FIRST BOOT IN THE PI.

Hope this helps

Dave

[ghans]

All proper tools to handle Pi images are only available on Linux. gparted is one of them.


ghans

[antiriad]

Thank you very much for your feedback.
Going a bit further: is technically possibile to make in Raspbian another (third) partition like "boot", readable both in Raspbian and Windows/Mac?
And maybe to make users to expand it with a custom script?
Thanks

[ghans]

Windows only mounts the first partition on removable media.

The Pi expects the first partition to be FAT. It doesn't support UDF , HFS , NTFS or anything else on the boot partition.

ghans

[DougieLawson]

Windows only mounts the first partition Windows readable partitions on removable media.

FTFY

It will also threaten to reformat every unreadable parition. ALWAYS choose [CANCEL] from those pop-ups.

[antiriad]

Hello,
I have abandoned the idea of expanding the boot partition (for transferring data I set up a shared Samba folder), but I'm stil trying to make my Raspbian (not NOOBS) customized image as light as possible (would be great to keep below 1GB).

I successfully built this Raspbian Shrink script for Docker on Mac, but still I get 2.5 GB image (from 4GB).

Any other hint?
(maybe this script will work also on Mac, more confortable for me?)

Thanks

[n67]

Windows only mounts the first partition on removable media.

The rumor is that this is fixed in Windows 10. I do not have a Windows 10 machine upon which to test this.

Could someone test/confirm this rumor?

Note: By "fixed", I mean that it will mount all Windows-readable partitions; not just the first one.

[Imperf3kt]

Windows only mounts the first partition on removable media.

The rumor is that this is fixed in Windows 10. I do not have a Windows 10 machine upon which to test this.

Could someone test/confirm this rumor?

Note: By "fixed", I mean that it will mount all Windows-readable partitions; not just the first one.

Not sure where this (mis?)information comes from, but in the last ~20 years I have been using Windows, it has never _not_ shown all readable partitions on external media.
Its actually really frigging annoying.

Do note that I customise every install to show hidden files and folders (off by default to keep Windows 'idiot-proof')

[r3d4]

Windows only mounts the first partition Windows readable partitions on removable media.

FTFY

It will also threaten to reformat every unreadable parition. ALWAYS choose [CANCEL] from those pop-ups.

see also : diskmod.sys

[n67]

see also : diskmod.sys

Interesting. Check this URL for more info:

http://agnipulse.com/2012/03/filter-dri ... k-windows/

There seems to be several alternatives (3 are given at the URL) - of which "diskmod.sys" is only one - but note that they are all 3rd party (not-standard-Windows).


To whoever it was who posted above that this is a nothing-burger - that it "just works" - the article at the URL seems clear that it doesn't "just work" unless you use one of these "filter drivers". Whether any of this is true or not, I must confess I have never tested, so cannot say with any certainty - note that it takes a fair amount of setup (some would say, a perverse setup) to test this. I suspect that the poster did not actually test correctly.

[r3d4]

I'd like to share my customized Raspbian as a downloadable

Ok ...

What did you change in rasbian ?

Why do you need ppl to download raspbian + your changes ?


IMHO

You should
A) script your changes to rasbian , and distribute the script .

B) make the changes that you need to PiCore which is the pi version a tiny linuxOS ,so smaller to DL.

[feelslikeautumn]

Yeah, if you want to go down the scripting route then you could do it with the debian installer (I posted my own version for raspbian last month). That only needs something like 30MB, and with a preseed file you could automate the whole thing. The downside is to install it takes something like 30 of 40 mins on a pi3.

If you are after a more instant thing (and depending on your use case), you might like to consider a debian live install image. Again, I posted my own version of lubuntu for the pi on this forum as an example. It uses squashfs and is under 1GB.

Otherwise I can only suggest standard compression tools, with the compression turned all the way up to get it under 1GB.