Anywhere to download an old Pi OS below 2GB?

[lilzz]

I have a few SD Card that's 2 GB and I don't want to waste them.

The old OS is OK, where I can download them?

[klricks]

All current and previous releases are here:
http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/

You may have to manually update the boot files as old versions will not work on newer A+ & B+ or some A & B with different ram chips may also need newer boot files.

[mikerr]

2013-09-10-wheezy-raspbian.img is the most recent full raspbian that still fits on a 2GB card.

Or you could go as small as 16 meg (not gb) SD card if you use a usb flash drive:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/boot-from-a-16mb-sd-card/

[DirkS]

Or start from scratch using raspbian-ua-netinst

Gr.
Dirk.

[Joe Schmoe]

The gist of this thread is that it probably doesn't make any sense to mess around with old versions.

Rather, you should find a way to use a current version with your small cards.

The easiest way to do that is to (as Dougie suggests - and as is well documented in about 10,000 other threads) put the rootfs onto a USB device. Then you only need about 16 (or so) megs on the SD card.

But I think the way I would do it is to take a current Raspbian image (installed and running on sufficiently large media) and remove unneeded stuff. For starters, I think removing Wolfram/Mathematica should get you down pretty close to 2G, since I think it's generally agreed that adding those packages is what brought it way above 2G in the first place. Find a few more unneeded things, get it under the magic 2G limit, then image that. Restore the image onto a 2G card and Bob's your uncle. Note, that if you do this, you won't have much space left on your running system for either installation of new software or accumulating files in your $HOME. That's in the category of "It can't be helped".

Finally, there's also network booting (which is, in a sense, a variation of USB booting). Again, you'd put just minimal stuff on the SD card and the rootfs comes from the network. Alas, I've never really tried this, because there don't seem to exist any good (I.e., actually usable) HOWTOs. Everything I've read has been in the "well, this almost, sorta, kinda works"/"It might work if you edit this file, config that server, download these 175 packages, tweak this, tweak that, dah dah dah" category.

I'd like to see the network booting actually work. Really, I would…

[pluggy]

I have a nice script I use to cut standard Raspbian down from 2.4 GB to about 900MB. It loses all the X stuff.....

I dislike the other cut down versions because stuff I want to work often doesn't. Very few of them have raspi-config, which I like as an easy quick way of doing lots of stuff. And at the command line level it works exactly like standard Raspbian, because that's
what it is.

It does need a bigger card to start with though......

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
# Stephen's Raspberry Pi Mimimalist install from standard Raspdian Image
apt-get update
apt-get purge xserver* -y
apt-get purge ^x11 -y
apt-get purge ^libx -y
apt-get purge ^lx -y
apt-get purge samba* -y
apt-get purge ifplugd -y
apt-get autoremove -y
apt-get upgrade -y
apt-get clean

Oh, and it doesn't get a lot more open source than that.

The Windoze fans might choose to leave samba in......