step by step guide?

[secretreeve]

is anyone able to throw up a step by step guide on preping an SD card and getting the root files onto said SD card? (simple terms for the new people to linux and assuming the'yre on windows)

if someone can take the time to do that then it would definatly be worth pinning and save alot of repeat questions.

[piglet]

I did this:


Downloaded & unzipped the image
Googled: win32diskimager-binary.zip & downloaded & unzipped I used ( https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+download )
Shoved my SD card+reader into the machine
Looked at the drive letter it allocated in windows
Ran win32diskimager, pointed it at the image, and the drive letter with the card in it.

Pressed the "write" button!

Simple as that. It wouldn't let me use any drive other than the memory card.

I booted to Ubuntu 11 and gparted showed it all looking perfect - with a nice large area left on my card to allocate for data.

[secretreeve]

kool,

but when you say downloaded and unzipped the image, what image do you mean? the ubuntu 11 iso?

[piglet]

No, the Debian image from the http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads section.

[secretreeve]

ah excellent, so what does that image actually do? and waht do we do with it once we have a Pi unit?

[grumpyoldgit]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

[grumpyoldgit]

secretreeve said:


ah excellent, so what does that image actually do? and waht do we do with it once we have a Pi unit?


You have a Debian Squeeze operating system on the Pi.

[Vindicator]

Looks good piglet the same way I did mine after fighting with windd, win32imager made it easy and concise without further research and reading of manuals.

I used disk utility in 11.10 but got same picture.

[secretreeve]

seems to make sence then, im kinda a beginner with most linux distro's i used ubuntu for about a year on and off. so if i can understand this then i think most people can.

i was actually looking to get ubuntu 11.10 onto the Pi but for my usage for the unit any os will do really. i'll have to follow these instructions and try out this debian squeeze as i have NO idea what the os contains or anything

[RaTTuS]

Ubuntu will not work from the off the the RPi but may later on,

debian is very close to what Ubuntu does

[in fact most linux variants are really similar - depending on what you do ]

[stevescat]

Could someone do a step by step guide, in the same simple terms as Piglet did for Windows, for MacOS please?

[nick.mccloud]

stevescat said:


Could someone do a step by step guide, in the same simple terms as Piglet did for Windows, for MacOS please?


See http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2.....x-with-dd/

[Cylon]

stevescat said:


Could someone do a step by step guide, in the same simple terms as Piglet did for Windows, for MacOS please?


You could try the following i will be trying this method as soon as i download.

Using Diskutil (Mac OS X only)


Download the desired .img file
Open a Terminal (under Utilities)

Run diskutil list to get the current list of devices


Insert your flash media

Run diskutil list again and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)



Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN



Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/diskN bs=1m



Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes



Try it and let me/us know

[stevescat]

Brilliant! Thanks guys for your help. Will try this method this evening. Am I correct in assuming after the OS in written to the SD card and used to boot the RasPi, any free space left can be used as and when, no need to partition further?

[liz]

Liam's also planning on putting a video guide up sometime this week, I think, so you might want to wait for that.

[piglet]

stevescat said:


Brilliant! Thanks guys for your help. Will try this method this evening. Am I correct in assuming after the OS in written to the SD card and used to boot the RasPi, any free space left can be used as and when, no need to partition further?


You'll need to use a partition tool to define the unused space.

[stevescat]

Thanks again Piglet. Not sure whether to wait for Liam's videos or have a crack at it myself.

[secretreeve]

okay so i gave this all a try and for what ever reason my 8gb sd card is showing as being 74.4MB (of which 46.9mb is free space)

so my question is, wheres the other 7.9gb gone?

[secretreeve]

never mind, i found it in EMP as unallocated space, well mostly anyway.

74.4mb primary (46.9mb free)

1.55gb (1.55gb used) *other* format

other amount (full) *other* format

5.67gb unallocated space (reformatted to FAT32)

[mgmt_idiot]

I've asked this elsewhere (Fedora Thread) a couple of weeks back, albeit slightly differently expressed, but no-one answered - I guess the Seneca Fedora people are working hard on the build rather than answering questions.

I can understand doing a dd to create a BIOS-type capability on the SD card for initial boot. But having got an initial boot then I'd prefer to install the OS from an iso.

Any insights?

[digital_addict]

mgmt_idiot said:


Any insights?

Check out the home page, second item Chris Tyler's video. The Fedora Remix OS is supposed to be available for download Wed 22/2/12. SD installation should be same as Debian. Only one left is Arch Linux, not been following this one so don't know. AFAIK these are the only distributions ported to ARM.

[mgmt_idiot]

digital_addict said:


Check out the home page, second item Chris Tyler's video.

SD installation should be same as Debian.


I watched the video when it came out. I didn't see any mention of an installation process from iso, as opposed to a "copy image to SD card" process. The notion of it being the same as Debian is kind of concerning.

I see a lot of mucking about with yum in my future

Still, it's very early days. Maybe an installation option more to my preference will emerge in a few months from the community. Probably after F17 and F18 are out.

[grumpyoldgit]

mgmt_idiot said:


digital_addict said:


Check out the home page, second item Chris Tyler's video.

SD installation should be same as Debian.


I watched the video when it came out. I didn't see any mention of an installation process from iso, as opposed to a "copy image to SD card" process. The notion of it being the same as Debian is kind of concerning.

I see a lot of mucking about with yum in my future

Still, it's very early days. Maybe an installation option more to my preference will emerge in a few months from the community. Probably after F17 and F18 are out.


The installation process is pretty simple. I'm scratching my head to work out what you think is complicated about it.

[rurwin]

mgmt_idiot said:

I can understand doing a dd to create a BIOS-type capability on the SD card for initial boot. But having got an initial boot then I'd prefer to install the OS from an iso.
Why?

The difficult dd commands are a symptom of the early release. They can and will be packaged into user-friendly applications on both Linux and Windows, well before the educational release.

The hardware of a Raspberry Pi is fixed. About the only things worth configuring are the screen resolution and the keyboard layout. Both of those can be done with single commands on the first boot. There is no necessity to run a complex installation script.

Installing from ISO requires media attached to the RPi that many people do not have.

Copying to SD card allows people to have a bank of template images configured how they want, whereas doing the same with ISO would require them to repackage the distribution themselves.

Perhaps if you could tell us the use-case that you are concerned about, we could understand what your concerns were and either agree with you or allay them.

[tawalker]

Looking forward to the Arch distro image release too

Thanks for all your hard work, everyone!