Monthly Archives: July 2013

07.05.13
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MINIBIAN 2013-07-05 is out!

My first release is out.
The image was obtainted using Raspbian Installer with the following options:

  • Language: English
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Keyboard Layout: British English
  • Mirror archive: mirrordirector.raspbian.org
  • Directory: /raspbian/
  • Partiton: removed swap partition and created new ext4 partition (850Mb size)
  • Software to install: Standard system utilities and SSH Server

Then some other offline steps were taken on SD Card in order to optimize system:

  • Added gpu_mem=16 options in /boot/config.txt for setting GPU memory size
  • Added elevator=deadline option in /boot/cmdline.txt for setting right disk scheduler
  • Corrected mount point in /boot/cmdline.txt (after swap partition removing the kernel couldn’t find mount point)
  • Added noatime,nodiratime,commit=120 options in /etc/fstab for better SD Card performance and reliability
  • Added –noclear option in /etc/inittab in order to avoid screen clean at boot
  • Added ip address showing script in /etc/rc.local
  • Removed MAC address in udev rules in order to work with different RPI hardware
  • Added daily scheduled fstrim command for /
  • Zeroed free space in /boot and in / for better image compressing
  • Created and compressed image

The MINIBIAN main features are indicated here.

So, those are the steps i made for creating this release. As you can see basically this is the same kernel and binary of official image, but quite smaller and with better performance.
You can download this image, following this link at sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/minibian/files/2013-07-05-wheezy-minibian.tar.gz/download

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07.04.13
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MINIBIAN: MINImal raspBIAN image for Raspberry Pi

In the past few months, I’ve spent many time on Raspberry Pi. I was one of the first to own it when the distributions were still in its infancy.
Since that time, the world of embedded Linux has changed and the global demand for such solutions has grown exponentially.
The founders of the project Raspberry Pi did not expect all this success: in fact, the project was born primarily to provide a low cost computer in education and in the countries in the developing world.
They could not imagine at first, that such a product would become a must for many makers around the world, which they saw in the RPi a chance until now quite inaccessible: that of creating embedded systems which are powerful, flexible and low cost.
The project was born for another though, so the official images available on the site do not always fit these needs. So I started looking around to see if there was some other image or distribution fitting my needs.
Unfortunately the result of this research was a bit disappointing because what I was looking for was basically a system based on Raspbian (excellent widely known distribution), lighter than the official one, but 100% compatible.
Hence was born the idea of ​​making such image by myself.
So I started from the simple Raspbian installer and I only installed the core system,  basic utilities, and the sshd daemon.
In this way, we have an embedded system that can boot in 22 seconds, use 45MB RAM and 522MB of disk space.
I finally found my favorite distribution, and i thought it was nice to share it with the world!
BYE!!!