[colug-432] Fwd: Re: Debian on Pi

[lhowell at speakeasy.net]

I sent this then realized it replies only to the poster, ot the list.

>On Sun May  5  9:07 , <lhowell at speakeasy.net> wrote:>On Sun May  5  5:06 , 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
>>
>>
>
>The primary difference between the Raspbian and Debian images is that Raspbian is hard-float and Debian is soft-float.  Debian will work fine, but at the cost of a performance hit.  The Pi ARM11 hardware does well for what it is, but needs all the help from the OS it can get so I'd choose HF.  I followed the creation of Raspbian vian discussions on the debian-arm mailing list, which was a six month effort as the Debian "wheezy" source for 35000+ packages was rebuilt for the ARM11 v6 ABI instead of the normal ARM9 v7 ABI.  Much of the time was spent fixing hard-float issues.  The Cambridge team was very time constrained and chose the more expedient path of building with soft-float. 
>My wife gave me two Pi's for Christmas.  One is my media server running the Pi version of openELEC (openelec.tv) and I used to other one to pass the Kalamazoo winter evenings experimenting with different OS images.  If you want a minimal headless OS I suggest looking at http://www.pi-point.co.uk/raspbian-minimal/ which is the standard Raspbian HF image with about 75% of the packages stripped.  You can start small and add whatever you like from the Raspbian repo.
>SD cards are a sticky issue, and a discussion for another time.  The Pi demands quality cards.  I've had good luck with SanDisk Mobile microSDHC 4GB cards (4.99 at MC).  I don't worry too much about the class rating.  That rating criteria is for handling relatively large files on cameras, not the much smaller files on an embedded device like the Pi.
>
>Larry
>
>