[colug-432] Debian on Pi

[Rick Troth]

> I bought a Raspberry Pi, finally.

You're way ahead of me.  Must be the price that keeps holding me back.  :-)

> When inserting either card into the Pi and applying power,
> nothing happened.  The red power LED illuminates,
> but the green SD card access light never lights up.

Wondering if it's a bootstrapping issue.
(Though this behaviour with the SD card indicator doesn't support the
idea.)

Can you use two SD cards at once?  (Maybe one of them via USB?)  Three
options come to mind.  In all of these, you'd boot with Raspbian to then
get a handle on your Debian content.

FIrst, if the bootstrap is filesystem capable, then you could copy Debian
onto SD with a working Raspbian.  Carefully move the bootstrap files into
some safe directory, delete the non-boot contents (most of it), then just
'rsync' the preferred distro onto the card.  THIS MIGHT require three
mounted filesystems.

If that doesn't fly, then you could try using the Raspbian bootstrap to
flash fresh MBR and friends onto a Debian SD.

If that one doesn't work either, then you could try 'chroot' Debian (from a
running Raspbian) and re-run the Debian bootstrap flasher.

In all cases, you would confirm that the Debian system is actually intact.

-- R; <><





On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 8:06 AM, Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net> wrote:

> I bought a Raspberry Pi, finally.
>
> I intend to use this headless, so the Fedora Remix and the Raspbian
> distributions both seem like more than I need.  A good old fashioned
> minimal install of Debian should suffice.
>
> >From the http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions page, I downloaded the
> following image:
>
> http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/debian/6/debian6-19-04-2012/debian6-19-04-2012.zip
>
> I flashed the image onto two different SD cards: one 4GB class 4
> device, and one 8GB class 10 device.
>
> When inserting either card into the Pi and applying power, nothing
> happened.  The red power LED illuminates, but the green SD card access
> light never lights up.
>
> I flashed the official Raspbian image
> (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads) onto the 4GB card, and the Pi
> boots. The green SD card access LED illuminates, the NIC lights flash,
> and I can access the device over the network.
>
> I'd really rather stick with stock Debain, rather than Raspbian, if at
> all possible. Is there a better Debian image I should be trying,
> perhaps?
>
> Thanks,
> Scott
> _______________________________________________
> colug-432 mailing list
> colug-432 at colug.net
> http://lists.colug.net/mailman/listinfo/colug-432
>



-- 
-- R;   <><
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.colug.net/pipermail/colug-432/attachments/20130505/ebf168e8/attachment.html