Raspbian minimal. What's your choice? (Part I)
Raspbian minimal: What's your choice? (Part I)
Sometime as developer or admin with expertise, we need a distro with a few installed packages and a bunch of free RAM. In this case, we can use a Raspbian minimal. I cover on this article two of them.
MINImal raspBIAN image for Raspberry Pi (Minibian)
Download: sourceforge.net
Last file uploaded: 2013-10-13-wheezy-minibian.tar.gz (188.5 MB)
Login: root | Password: raspberry
Info:
Kernel 3.10.25+ #622 ARM HF (Hard Float)
22 secs boot
583 Mb disk space used
Fit on 1GB SD Card
Optimized ext4 file system with swap disabled
Targeted for embedded or server applications (NAS, Web server, electronic applications)
100% full compatible with official release
DHCP client enabled
SSHD enabled
45 Mb RAM used after boot
Notes: No desktop environment installed, as usual on this kind of distro. build-essential is not installed (60.5 MB of additional disk space). config.txt only with the option to set GPU, but you can fill with others as you can see on elinux.org. raspi-config is missing. camera-utils is installed by default.
Raspbian Wheezy armhf Raspberry Pi minimal image
Direct Download: linuxsystems.it
Last file uploaded: raspbian_wheezy_20130923.img.7z (123.4 MB)
Login: root | Password: raspberry
Info:
3.6.11+ hardfp kernel with latest raspberry pi patches
Disabled incremental updates, means apt-get update is much faster
Workaround for a kernel bug which hangs the Raspberry Pi under heavy network/disk loads
Latest version of the firmwares
Fits 1GB SD cards
A very tiny 118MB image: even with a 2GB SD there is a lot of free space
The clock is automatically updated using ntp
IPv6 support
ssh starts by default
Just 14MB of ram usage after the boot
Notes: The author cover two versions: soft or hard float support. config.txt have several default options. Boot process is faster than the first Minibian commented before. We have a swap RAM partition, but you can disable it to reclaim RAM.You need to use gparted or another similar app to resize the partition, because there is a swap partition at the end who doesn't allow to resize the first. You can delete it with the next commands anyway:
parted /dev/mmcblk0
print <- show partitions
rm 3 <- delete partition number 3
quit <- exit from parted
On both distribution raspi-config is missing, but you can install it with the next commands:
echo "deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/raspberrypi.gpg.key
apt-key add raspberrypi.gpg.key
apt-get update && apt-get install raspi-config -y
raspi-config
Jump to the second part here.