More raspberry pi

Arch

I have been using Arch Linux a little of late and like many things about Arch and The Arch Way.

First of all, the Arch wiki has excellent documentation. This is critical to its success, since it does many things a little differently to the larger linux distributions.

An initial Arch install will not install much beyond the bare essentials to get you up and running. This does mean it can take a little while to get a new system just how you want it, but has the advantage you do not end up with hundreds of packages installed which you have little idea what they do. For the security conscious this is a definite plus.

One feature I love is that their are no dev packages. Anyone who has tried using any of the main linux distributions and is in the habit of compiling code on those systems will have run into the situation where code fails to build due to missing C header files.

In the major distributions these header files are in separate dev packages. The philosophy is that most people are not compiling code on these machines so do not need the header files. This choice is fine until a new user decides to try compiling some code and then is hit by the missing header file issue. Just another obstacle put in the way of potential new developers.

In contrast, Arch argues that these header files are generally tiny and including them in the main package adds little overhead and saves a lot of time for anyone doing development. It would be good if more distros made this switch.

Using Arch will present some challenges to a new user, but given the excellent state of the documentation it is also an excellent way to gain a thorough understanding of how everything works.

Raspbian

Raspbian appears to be the most widely used distribution on the raspberry pi. It is based on the Debian and has over 35,000 packages available.

Since I have mostly used Debian based distributions this seems a good place to start.

Trying different distros can get a little time consuming, between downloading images and copying them onto SD cards. Further, different images are needed for the older pi's and the pi 2.

The simplest way to get a Raspian system up and running is to download the raspian image from raspberrypi.org.

To install just copy to the SD card device using dd:

dd if=raspian_image_you_downloaded.img of=/dev/SDCARD

Finding the device for your SD card can be tricky. lsblk shows you all the block devices and with luck your SD card will be there.

On my Ubuntu system it is /dev/mmblk0, on an Arch machine it showed up as /dev/sdb. You can usually figure things out using the SIZE of the device.

Note also that you want the block with TYPE disk, not any of the partitions it might have.

Raspbain installer

Another approach is to use this Raspbian installer. One clear advantage is that it is a small download, a mere 11MB and a small copy onto your SD card.

You then just plug it into the pi, turn on the pi with a wired network connection and the install happens by magic. It takes 20 minutes or so, with a reasonable internet connection.

Other advantages include:

• you use the same installer for the original pi's and the pi 2.
• the installer installs the latest packages from the release (currently wheezy) that you choose.
• you can customise the installer to include additional packages and a number of other customisations.

The down side is that the base install comes without a GUI environment. Depending on what you intend to do with the pi this may not be a problem.

I am going to experiment with customising the installer to see if I can get it to install lxde, emacs, git and some other goodies I like to have around on my systems.

Update

I cloned the git repository for the rasbian net installer:

git clone git@github.com:debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst.git

I then added an installer-config.txt to specify some extra packages to install.

I then followed the instructions in BUILD.md to rebuild the image and installed from there.

This did not go as well as I had hoped, since although the extra packages got installed their dependencies did not, at least that is what I think happened.

It also took me a couple of goes, installer-config.txt needs to be given execute permission, eg:

chmod 77f installer-config.txt

to make this work.

I decided to try using post-install.txt instead. By the time this runs the install is pretty much complete.

My first attempt with this was just to add the following apt-get call:

apt-get install -y git emacs aptitude xserver-xorg-video-fbdev lxde curl htop nmap

But this failed to do anything. Time to track down the actuall install script and see how what is going on.

The actual install script is in scripts/etc/init.d/rcS

Now I understand. The installer basically boots a minimal linux kernel and then uses a single init script, run during the boot to do the install.

Reading that script it becomes clear what I need to do. The new operating system is actually mounted on /rootfs and I need to use the chroot command to make sure apt-get runs with that as the root filesystem. So I ended up with post-install.txt looking like this:

#!/bin/bash

# install some extra goodies.  Do it here rather than in packages to
# pull in dependencies

chroot /rootfs /usr/bin/apt-get install -y \
   git emacs aptitude xserver-xorg-video-fbdev lxde curl htop nmap

Bingo! It works, modulo having to hit enter three times to say OK to some dialogs that the lxde desktop environment displays.

One other trick I used in all this was mounting the SD card's first partition after copying the installer onto it. This allows me to copy over a new installer-config.txt or post-install.txt without having to rebuild the full image.

Overall, I am liking this installer.