SD cards ready...I think...

[jeephead]

Ok so like most I am preparing for my Raspberry Pi. I managed to partition a 32g SD card with the correct boot/linux partition scheme that I saw in this forum. That seemed to go well. Then I attempted to load the Distro onto the card. My old maching that I had Ubuntu 10x running on decided to melt down and was unavailable so I tried using the latest version of Ubuntu Live CD on my old laptop and got as far as I could before finding out the there is a bug in the latest version 11.x and I kept getting GTK...& PyQt4 errors every time the fedora-arm-installer program tried to run. This was just info I found on line that explained the issue I was having. I am by no means a Linux guru, just a general user trying to learn the in's and out's. Anyways, I tried the Knoppix 6.7 live CD and went back through getting the packages needed to run the installer. This was when I found out that Knoppix did not like my card reader. It would not show up in the device field. So I scrambled around looking for another card reader. Being cheap I did not want to buy a new one. So I tried my digital camera! It came up as an external storage device and I was able to hit the "Install" button. WHO-HOO!!

When I checked back in to see the progress, I see in the term window the "Killed" command was sent out. The card shows up as "Raspberry Pi" with 1 folder in it called "Lost N Found" I do not know if this was successfully installed until Pi shows up. Is there anyway I can test or figure out if my efforts were good?

I might try the whole process on a friend's Windows 7 machine since I saw that listed in other methods. Can any of this be done via Apple??

Thanks for any assistance.

-Z

[Techmeology]

A successfully installed RPi distro should have:


a boot partition with a kernel, bootloader, start.elf, ...
a root partition with all the usual stuff (usr, bin, etc, var, ...)

From the sounds of things, you haven't managed to install it correctly, yet.

The easiest way to get started is to simply write an image (downloadable from: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads) onto the card. There is a Fedora image, however the recommended one is the Debian one. Since you have a 32 GB card, you'll want to expand the root partition.

WARNING: Make sure you get sd_card_block_device correct, or you may destroy all the data on one of your hard disks!!!

Start with: sudo dd if=path_to_image of=sd_card_block_device

With something like gparted (which is available on the Ubuntu live CD), move the swap partition to the end of the card, and resize the second (root) partition to fill up the rest of the space. This assumes Debian Squeeze, though I'd imagine the partition structure for the other images is more or less the same. On my machine, sd_card_block_devices is /dev/sdb, however you should check this for your self before running dd!

Insert the card into the Raspberry Pi, and see if it boots.

[jeephead]

Thank you! I will give that a try later. Just trying to get things ready while I wait for delivery.

[jojopi]

jeephead said:

When I checked back in to see the progress, I see in the term window the "Killed" command was sent out.
I suspect that your laptop did not have enough memory (RAM), and the process that was writing to the SD card had to be killed before it had finished.

When running from a Live CD, a lot of stuff that would normally be written to disk has to be held in RAM instead, so memory is always tight, especially if you have installed extra packages that are not on the CD.

I think that the "RPi Easy SD Card Setup" on the wiki probably provides the best tested recommendations for writing the SD card, on a variety of operating systems:

http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup

[jeephead]

Yes I think that was what happened. The laptop was tanked for resources, I was hoping she pulled it off. Great info here, I will try another machine and not use a Live CD.

Thanks again..

-Z

[mahjongg]

Or use a live CD of a "lighter" distro, such as puppy linux.