[colug-432] Debian on Pi

[Scott Merrill]

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Rick Troth <rmt at casita.net> wrote:
>> I bought a Raspberry Pi, finally.
>
> You're way ahead of me.  Must be the price that keeps holding me back.  :-)

$39.99 at MicroCenter, plus $9.99 for a nifty plastic case.  For $50,
I get more compute power than my first four personal computers
combined, in a tiny little low-power package!  What's not to love?

>> 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.)

The bootstrap process is different from a typical Linux system. The Pi
boots from a FAT partition and loads the bits necessary to get to the
ext filesystem.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=6685

> Can you use two SD cards at once?  (Maybe one of them via USB?)

I can, and I intend to.  I plan to use one standard-sized SD card to
hold the root filesystem, and a microSD card in a USB adapter as the
primary storage partition.

I freely admit that I'm looking for a quick fix on this Sunday
morning, rather than all the yak shaving of fully learning the Pi boot
internals.  I know others on the list have been using Pis for a lot
longer than me, and I'm hoping that they've tackled this particular
problem for me! ;)

Cheers,
Scott