I recently picked up a Raspberry Pi from Creatron Inc with the intention of creating a dashboard.

The following are instructions for installing Linux (Debian Wheezy) on the SD card from OS X Mountain Lion.  I used the built in SD card reader on my Macbook Air and used several different SD cards, all 4 Gig or greater and all class 10.

These instructions assume comfort with the command line.

Installing Linux on SD Card

Download Raspbian optimised version of Debian Wheezy from:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

List currently mounted disks:

sudo diskutil list

/dev/disk0
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.4 GB   disk0s2
3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

Insert SD card, then determine which disk the SD card is:

sudo diskutil list

/dev/disk0
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.4 GB   disk0s2
3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *4.0 GB     disk1
1:             Windows_FAT_32                         58.7 MB    disk1s1
2:                      Linux                         3.9 GB     disk1s2

Unmount the SD card, in this example it is disk1:

sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Unmount of all volumes on disk1 was successful

Use dd to copy the img file to the SD card and install either regular Raspbian image or soft float.  The soft float is use for Oracle JVM 1.6.

Regular image:

sudo dd if=./2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

Soft float:

 sudo dd if=./2012-08-08-wheezy-armel.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

This will take about 35 minutes.

When complete, OS X will remount one of the new partitions, eject that new disk.

Linux Setup

Remove the SD card from the reader, install in the Raspberry Pi and plugin monitor and keyboard.

After boot the configuration application is run, these are the recommended steps and settings:

• expand_rootfs
• configure_keyboard
  • Generic 101-key PC
  • Other
  • English (US)
  • English (US)
  • The Default for the keyboard layout
  • No compose key
  • Use Control+Alt+Backspace to terminate the X server? No
• change_password
• change_locale
  • Unselect en_GB.UTF-8 UFT-8
  • Select en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
  • Default locale for the system environment, en_US.UTF-8
• change_timezone
• ssh
  • Enable

Finally reboot the device, on first reboot after running the configuration application a job will run to expand the partitions, this can take a few minutes depending on size of SD card

Reference:
http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup

Update System

After reboot and partitions have been expanded, updates should be run.  This can take an hour or more depending on speed of downloads.

Run the following commands, output has been removed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo reboot

Tagged Linux, Raspberry Pi | Posted on Saturday, March 2nd, 2013 | Comments Off on Raspberry Pi Install