Basic Debian setup for Raspberry Pi

Hardware, Raspberry Pi, ,

It took 3 weeks, but finally I’ve received my Raspberry Pi directly from RS.

IMHO the ideal GNU/Linux distribution for this device is Debian.
Here’s what I did to get a full Debian system.

Prerequisites

Identify SD card

Plug your card reader and take a look to system messages with “dmesg”:
$ dmesg
[22006.536054] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci_hcd
[22006.736355] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: Quirks match for vid 090c pid 6000: 100000
[22006.738687] scsi15 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[22007.737879] scsi 15:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic 6000 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[22007.739762] sd 15:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[22007.744742] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] 16659456 512-byte logical blocks: (8.52 GB/7.94 GiB)
[22007.745494] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[22007.745500] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 4b 00 00 08
[22007.746235] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present
[22007.746240] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[22007.750365] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present
[22007.750372] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[22007.757039] sdc: sdc1 sdc2
[22007.760977] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present
[22007.760984] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[22007.760989] sd 15:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk

In my case the SD is /dev/sdc.

Start write procedure

Please note than you will lose all SD content.
$ dd bs=1M if=~/Downloads/debian6-19-04-2012/debian6-19-04-2012.img of=/dev/sdc
This procedure took 8 minutes on my pc with my sd card (class 4)
real    7m50.845s
user    0m0.024s
sys     0m25.250s
Be sure to flush all caches
sync
Now you can disconnect your card and you are done.

Enjoy your new distro.

2GB for an entire OS, plus data? Maybe you used a bigger SD card? Stay tuned for my next tip.