I’m proud to announce a new Minbian version supporting the latest Raspberry Pi 3.
The features of this new releases are unchanged compared to the previous version.
You can check here for the new features list, while you can download the compressed image via sourceforge or via BitTorrent.
Please check the “Rpi3 HowTo” on how to enable wifi and bluetooth on Rpi3 as they are not enabled by default.
I woud like to thanx all people supporting and using Minbian: we reached over 100.000 total downloads from 176 different countries! Thanx, thanx and again thanx!
I’m very happy that my work could help spreading this incredible piece of technology! I would also like to dedicate this work to the person who inspires me every day and that is the most important person in my life: my beloved daughter Satya – Yes, even nerds have feelings 🙂
Stay tuned!!!
MD5: 136CAC722A4F78F49B54971AE1CC03EE
SHA1: 7C83919698BD58A221A741495872021CAF6CEEF3
P.S.: Minbian is a voluntary project. Please consider to DONATE to contribute to this project. Thanx
MINIBIAN - raspberry pi 
Thank you very much, excellent job, will test out as soon the 3 is here.
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Hi, I have a new Pi 3 and am asking myself if there will be a 64 Bit Version of Minibian cause the Pi 3 is now capable of 64Bit. Thanks for your great work so far!
Not for now, at least until there will be a Raspbian 64bit version…
Take a look at this forum:
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/43921/raspbian-moving-to-64-bit-mode
Thank you for the wonderful work you have made. 🙂 I really appreciate your work. In the coming months, I will be working on a project with the raspberry pi. Is this image compatible with the original raspberry pi? I will be crediting your amazing work when I finish this project. It is for the less fortunate students and youth in the philippines. Kudos to your great work!
Minibian is retro-compatibile with all previous raspberry pi board.
If u will work on no profit project, i will give credit on Minibian official page.
I’m proud to contribute to less fortunate youth.
Thanx
Luca
Yes it is a non-profit project. I will be placing a link to the Minibian official page on our project page soon. Thanks sir Luca for your wonderful project. Congratulations!
After writing the .img file of miniban on my sd card using win32diskImager, the Raspberry Pi cannot boot. Please tell me how to write the image correctly to sd card.
Hello Luca – Thanks for the great work. We use Minibian as the base for our Pi-based application. I just tried this image on Pi 3. I note the WiFi seems to drop a lot. I can power cycle the Pi 3, everything is fine, and then after 10 mins, it seems to drop, and need another power cycle. Do you see this?
Adding “sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off” to /etc/rc.local seems to have solved it for me
(https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/pi-3-wifi-unstable/14171/6)
Hi, I am trying to run “Mopidy” as a service on startup of device. It has extensions which uses “RPi.GPIO” (python gpio lib) and “max7219.led” (python spi display lib). On startup I get error: “[Errno 13] Permission denied”.
This is driving me crazy. How on earth could I give “Mopidy” full control over device?
Hello from France , to tell you thank you for your work and have to share the world. Thank you
First of all thanks for making MINIBIAN possible. I tried to re-generate the locales on a fresh system. I am not sure if that has to do something with the swap-disabled feature, but locale generation runs out of memory. Thank you.
Is the fdisk bug fixed in this one?
I really want to use this, but on a pi 3 it does not seem to be able to properly run the Java application TunerStudio. I keep getting the errors of “java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class jssc.SerialPortList” and “:Debug: Port not valid: No Controller Interface.” though I see /dev/ttyUSB0 – FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_AH01JV3S and have the JSSC drivers, oracle JDK 8 and usbutils installed. I have been at it for 3 days and unfortunately do not see a support forum for this distro. I love the boot time and am trying to keep it as minimal as possible for an automotive project but can not get the application to work, yet it works on Raspbian lite. Is there something missing from this distro that I just do not know about that I have to install? I am currently installing DietPi to try it out on there, but I really like this one. If anyone has any idea, please do let me know!
This does not work
fdisk -l
fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
d
2
n
p
2
w
Is there any other way to increase the size of the card?
I just installed raspi-config, used that to increase the card size then removed it.
@Luca Soltoggio I actually figured it out, it looks like the kernel was loading a different version of the drivers, I made a few posts above about what it was doing, but following the guide below fixed it. I have another issue though. Does Minibian have OpenGL ES installed? The same application I was having issues with, with the drivers I am also having trouble utilizing OpenGL ES. Using normal full on Raspbian Jessie, I get around 30fps with only 35% CPU utilization in http://tunerstudio.com which is a car tuning software, and ECU dash display program.
I am using Minibian for the quick boot up speed as I am wanting to use my Pi 3 with a 7inch screen as a full dashboard replacement for my project car. Though with Minibian I get only 12fps and 85% CPU utilization. Is OpenGL ES either not installed, or not enabled by default? The application is Java, which of course is not that efficient to begin with, but with full Raspbian Jessie it does have a smoother frame rate and low CPU, albeit a slow boot time. I am hoping to use the fast boot time of Minibian, but also get the performance that Raspbian is giving. (For a car dash board, it is essential that things are as close to real time as they can be, if my RPM is lagging I might over rev and hurt my motor). I feel that if I can get OpenGL ES to work properly (or whatever is holding Minibians java performance back) It will be the perfect distro for automotive use because of its speed.
I tried to increase both the Pi GPU memory, anywhere from 16M to 512M and say no difference, as well as increasing Java -Xmn768M -Xmx768M (the java switches made a very small FPS enhancement, but not in cpu utilization.
If you have any insight as to what may be holding pack the Java performance, please let me know.
http://www.phobic.no/2016/01/22/install-uarm-on-raspberry-pi/
An update to this turns out it might be an issue with how I am going about displaying my application. I am starting a x11 session and launching with .xinitc, which may not be able to use OpenGL ES in the first place. Looks like it may be back to square one with my project. : /
Hello from Hong Kong. Thank you so much for your wonder work!
I am having a serious issue where I have very slow boot times because the Pi waits for a network connection for a whole 1:30s before finishing booting if there is no ethernet cord attached. I can fix this by commenting out the last two lines in /etc/network/interfaces….however I have to uncomment those lines of I want an internet connection…is there some setting? I have tried disabling wait for network at boot in raspi-config but that does not solve the problem.
Awesome
Slow boot waiting for network connection unless I comment out parts of /network/etc/interfaces but then I dont have internet. Any Ideas?
The easiest way is to apt-get install raspi-config, then under the options select “do not wait for network”. then you can uninstall it if you wish, but its nice to have for different things, but raspi-config will slow your boot a little bit.
Hey thanks for the reply but that did not work:(. Any more ideas? I checked the raspi-config script and when you select fast boot it deletes a certain file which makes it wait…I checked and I dont have that file so raspi-configs method of slow boot-internet and fastboot/no wait is not the same as whatever is making mine slow 😦
here is my solution: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/45399/slow-boot-ethernet-wait/54350#54350
Hi, I tried yours solution, but it doesn’t work. I mean i create this file only. Any tips?
I have to say, MINIBIAN is a good idea, but I use dvorak layout, and I found when I don’t have network(pi1 seems have some network problem, that means I can ping lan host but the wan host, so I can’t use the apt-get!), loadkeys doesn’t work, dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration does’t work, raspi-config doesn’t work, how can I use MINIBIAN happily?
great project. Thanks for your work.
Is there a way to upgrade from Minibian Wheezy to Jessie without setting everything up from scratch?
What is the difference between “Jessie Minibian” and “Jessie Lite”?
Jessie Lite is the official Raspberry Pi Foundation Jessie lite image.
Minibian is my unofficial Jessie lite image.
The main difference is that Minibian is even smaller and lighter, while Jessie Lite include many firmware, drivers and imho unneeded software.
Thank you very much for Minibian! I am using it now on two Raspberry Pi’s for temperature logging. One Model B, one Model B+. The fact that it is smaller than the usual Raspbian is great, and I also modified it to all be read-only. Thanks for putting the image together.
Not at all! 🙂
Hi!
Can you tell if this distro is compatible with any of Orange Pi single-board computer?
I don’t know… you have to try!!!
Hello,
What can i do to make the new RPI camera 2.1 work with this image?
Hello Luca,
Thanks a billion for this perfect minimal OS. It is awesome.
One question:
There has been a raspbian update recently, which solves many bugs. (https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-update-raspbian/)
How can we upgrade the minibian to the latest jessie framework?
Is the following enough?
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Or is it needed to wait for a minibian deb release?
Hello and thanks for a fantastic image. As you are aware ttyAMA0 now is being used by bluetooth (don’t get me started on that) and you need to use the miniUART which has it’s Baudrate derived from system clock so u need to bring the system clock down to 250!!!! otherwise the bauds are not calculated correctly…. anyway it’s a mess. Where you able to do anything about it? What I mean is there are some “tutorials” talking about swapping the ports back (one of them http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/45571) which I did follow with out any luck. So is there anyway to use the ttyAMA0 or I am forced to use a usb to serial adaptor?
Best regards,
Dimitris
Great distro guys, but unusable on RPI A+. RPI A+ has no LAN Interface. So I thought: “well, lets use WLAN”… BIG FAIL! No wpa-supplicant, wifi firmware modules missing. Even the keyboard layout cannot be changed without LAN connection. Really great work guys. Sorry but I’m really upset right now and disappointed…
From https://minibianpi.wordpress.com/features/
“Support for RPi B, RPi B+, RPi 2B and the new RPi 3B”
Sorry, but missing wifi drivers (realtek-drivers), wpa-supplicant, raspi-config and parted are vital for a RPI. That is NOT platform specific. Despite that I was able to get it running on A+ after plugging in an USB LAN Interface. I’ve installed the missing packets and everything was fine.
Oh, and the missing packets were about 30 – 40 megs. Minibian still would fit on an 1G SD Card with the missing packets but it would be way more comfortable…
Florian, if those things are vital to you then Minibian is not the distro for you.
what a piece of shit apt-get upgrade doesn’t upgrade packages and apt-get install can’t find any common packages. Why can’t debian just release raspbian without all the added shit!!!
Maybe this isn’t the project for you. Have you tried Jessie Lite?
Or maybe valium?
Hello Luca,
is there a list of things you removed?
I really appreciate your work but i would like to see what was removed.
thank you
Nothing was removed… it’s just a basic default Raspbian installation…
the combo root/raspberry is not FUCKING working on my shitty pi2. What the heck is going on. I’m not the only one, I’ve seen comments about people complaining about this. Fuck your minifuckingbian if you can’t even provide valid credentials. Thanks for wasting my time
Before insult, check your keyboard… User and password are root and rasbperry, but maybe your “y” is in other place…
Connect via ssh and it will work.
Torrent should work, and the hash should be the same
Hello guys,
just wanted to download this great distro, but torrent not working (not found on tracker) and hashes don’t match the file downloaded from sourceforge. Have I missed something?
Thanks,
qeef
Will it work on the Pi Zero? 😕
You have to try… i never tried it
Just Tank you! I put about 10 raspberry thin clients with minibian in my workplace and they work nicely.
Thanx to you!
Please add the package console-setup otherwise the keyboard mappings are not correct. See my post here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=152468&p=999423&hilit=minibian#p999423
Enabling WiFi is nothing but a mess if you do not want or have a wired internet connection available on the RPi3, i.e. “There is no apt-get!”.
I tried to manually “collect” the needed packages on my Windows notebook — and gave up after at the dependency depth of 5. Could you PRETTY PLEASE assemble a tarball or whatever containing the needed packages so one could just “dpkg -i” on the stuff required?
I am living in a wireless world and do not want to change my mind on this certain topic 😉
My plans for tonight and the next days and nights WOULD HAVE BEEN to target a “Linux From Scratch” approach for the RPi3 built along and inspired by your MiniBIAN to lead it further to 64 bits. But now I keep beeing stuck by moronic dependencies within the Jessie “architecture” (mind the quotation marks…).
Try Arch Linux. It is way smaller than minibian and way more user friendly. Plus: the package manager is available! 🙂 My next setups will completely be Arch. Minibian is dead for me.
Anyone figure out how to get the autologin to work for minibian? I tried both the ol inittab way and the new systemd way with no avail. thanks.
It works great with the RPi 3 except for bluetooth. It has something to do with the serial port that bluetooth wants to use. I tried apt-get dist-upgrade and rpi-update. Neither of which fixed the problem.
Configuring the built-in wireless was easy:
apt-get install firmware-brcm80211 iw crda wireless-regdb wireless-tools wpa_supplicant.
I noticed the sources.list file was a little broken IMHO. It should be something like this by default:
deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian jessie main firmware non-free contrib rpi
#deb-src http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian jessie main firmware non-free contrib rpi
Also, please include pico(nano) in your next roll-out. Keep up the good work. Thanks.
Hi, I have a old pi, model B (with 26 pins). What would be the best release for me to use? MINIBIAN 2013-10-13? or should i use a newer release?
Thank you
thank you for this ood work.
But i can’t have sound with this version.
What i need to install for have sound.
Best regards
thank you for this good work.
But i can’t have sound with this version.
What i need to install for have sound.
Best regards
Have any of you experiences video playing videos from MiniBian -> HDMI -> DHMI-VGA adapter -> monitor? I am in trouble with it. I used omxplayer, but the resolution / freq does not working.
I got the terminal on screen but no video.
Tried the following:
first I set the optimal HDMI in /boot/config.txt
hdmi_drive=2
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=16
Then in the command line
tvservice –explicit=”DMT 16 HDMI”
So I think you can change it still under working,
It is OK, but the omxplayer, for example:
omxplayer -r –win “0 0 640 480” -o hdmi /mnt/camera/video/record.mp4
does not to intend to play.
Any suggestion?
Anyway to enable GPIO/I2C ?
Great little distro.
Works on a Raspberry Pi Zero fine, just have to setup the networking on another PI first. No big deal.
I forgot to ask, how do you enable the camera on this distro ?
After much isolation to make sure I could back my claim, this 2016-03-12 image cannot boot my Pi B. Verified md5 of download, tried 3 computers, 2 os’, 4 sdcards, 2 card readers. I just get a solid red light, never a green flash of any sort. Same instructions with the 2015 image as well as raspbian jessie and it boots.
Why on earth would you use a password like “raspberrY”? You do know Minibian hasn’t support for anything else than English keyboard layout?
It’s hard enough to find all characters, but Linux never shows what you are typing in so you have to get THE IDEA you’re typing something completely else (depending on your normal keyboard layout) because of it.
And because changing keyboard layouts always is a pain in Linux, I though I would just get raspi-config. Everything else went fine, but I can’t change the keyboard layout, because there is some I3 error -.-
It would be really nice if someone could explain to a stupid Windoze user which packages (if any) to get or to use so the display shows what I’m typing in.
Hi, thank you for your efforts in giving us this very useful platform. However I’m having problems installing docker – the rpi docker install script “curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh” appears to work (installing new repositories and keys) but fails at the main event – install docker-engine. Fails with “package not found”. This works fine with standard raspbian lite. can you shed some light on why this would fail on minibian? I’ve done “upgrade” and “dist-upgrade” numerous times, with “update” and reboots inbetween, so all the repositories etc should be bang up to date, but still the docker install fails.
thanks again
Doug
Hello, I like very much your motivation to propose a distro that is very lightweight.
Still, I would like to add some kernel features that are not set by default. Is it possible to have the kernel config file so I can recompile with them? I didn’t find it on boot partition.
Thanks,
Thomas
The kernel is just the default Raspbian Kernel. I didn’t recomipiled it
Can you make “stretch” version?
Problem with RPi 3B onboard bluetooth solved:
— solved here —
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=148244&p=975241
by DirkS » Sun May 15, 2016 1:30 pm
by rkanton » Sun May 15, 2016 7:08 pm
— my config —
hardware: RPi 3B
display: Watterott 2.8″ RPi-Display or Waveshare 3.2″ Touchscreen
OS: Minibian 2016-03-12
# check hciuart.service
> systemctl status hciuart.service
● hciuart.service – Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/hciuart.service; enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon 2016-10-31 18:51:27 CET; 42min ago
Process: 247 ExecStart=/usr/bin/hciattach /dev/serial1 bcm43xx 921600 noflow – (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
Oct 31 18:51:26 minibian systemd[1]: Starting Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART…
Oct 31 18:51:26 minibian hciattach[247]: Can’t open serial port: No such file or directory
Oct 31 18:51:26 minibian hciattach[247]: Can’t initialize device: No such file or directory
Oct 31 18:51:27 minibian systemd[1]: hciuart.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
Oct 31 18:51:27 minibian systemd[1]: Failed to start Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART.
Oct 31 18:51:27 minibian systemd[1]: Unit hciuart.service entered failed state.
# hciattach /dev/serial1 … fails because the device does not exist
> ls -l /dev/serial1
ls: cannot access /dev/serial1: No such file or directory
# Devices /dev/serial0 and /dev/serial1 are created
# by udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/99-com.rules
# check for 99-com.rules udev file
> ls -l /etc/udev/rules.d/99-com.rules
ls: cannot access /etc/udev/rules.d/99-com.rules: No such file or directory
# if it is missing, install package raspberrypi-sys-mods:
> apt-get install raspberrypi-sys-mods
> reboot
# now check again hciuart.service
> systemctl status hciuart.service
● hciuart.service – Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/hciuart.service; enabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2016-10-31 20:52:35 CET; 1h 41min ago
Process: 257 ExecStart=/usr/bin/hciattach /dev/serial1 bcm43xx 921600 noflow – (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 500 (hciattach)
CGroup: /system.slice/hciuart.service
└─500 /usr/bin/hciattach /dev/serial1 bcm43xx 921600 noflow –
Oct 31 20:52:31 minibian5 systemd[1]: Starting Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART…
Oct 31 20:52:35 minibian5 hciattach[257]: bcm43xx_init
Oct 31 20:52:35 minibian5 hciattach[257]: Flash firmware /lib/firmware/BCM43430A1.hcd
Oct 31 20:52:35 minibian5 hciattach[257]: Set Controller UART speed to 921600 bit/s
Oct 31 20:52:35 minibian5 hciattach[257]: Device setup complete
Oct 31 20:52:35 minibian5 systemd[1]: Started Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART.
service running — problem solved
Hi Luca, Thanks for the great mini distribute, I enjoyed it a lot. Once thing though, the official Raspbian build added the camera support for raspberry pi zero back in April, 2016. Could you please provide a newer release to support it? or is there any workaround?
Thanks!
I think I got it working by “apt-get dist-upgrade”
Raspbian 2016-05-10 has the drivers required so that with a little tweak to config.txt and cmdline.txt a Pi Zero can be booted and programmed using just a usb cable !!! (and a pc, of course)
Please could you build a new version of Minibian so that 1Gb SD cards can be used in this setup. Many thanks.