Raspbian (Jessie) netinstall on Raspberry Pi

I came across this project and managed to successfully use it to install a minimal Raspbian installation. If you are like me and looking to skim the fat out of the original SD card installation of Raspbian, then this blog walks you through how to go about doing it.

Pre-installation step

Prerequisites
- SD Card of at least 4GB in size
- Familiarity with the OS you are using to execute the steps below
Format the SD Card with FAT32 format
- On Windows, choose File System to be “FAT32” in the format window
- On Mac, choose the “MS-DOS (FAT)” option when formatting
- On Linux, install dosfstools and use a command like mkdosfs -F32 -I /dev/sdX
Download the latest release of the zip file from here
Unzip the files and copy all the contents of the extracted file to a formatted SD Card.

Create a file installer-config.txt on the root of the SD Card with the following content

  release=jessie  
  hostname=sharavati  
  rootpw=p@ssw0rd  
  bootsize=+256M  
  packages=wireless-tools,wpasupplicant

Installation steps

Insert the above-created SD Card into the Raspberry Pi and power it on. Since it’s a fully automated installation, wait until it completes and comes up with a login prompt.

Post-install steps

Create a wireless network for Edimax EW-7811UN (skip this step or adapt it to your hardware)
Check if your wireless card has been detected by executing iwconfig. If you found wlan0 from the above command, then you are good to go. If there was no wlan0 entry, then check that your respective wireless driver module is added and inserted into the kernel.

Insert the following lines to the /etc/network/interfaces file

  auto wlan0  
  allow-hotplug wlan0  
  iface wlan0 inet dhcp    
  wpa-ssid SSID_OF_YOUR_WIRELESS_NETWORK  
  wpa-psk SOME_HEX_DECEMIAL_STRING

Use the “wpa_passphrase” command to obtain your network password in an ASCII passphrase

If you are using an Edimax EW-7811UN USB wifi adapter and facing an issue with a frozen SSH connection, add the below lines into a file /etc/modprobe.d/8192cu.conf and reboot
```
  Disable power management  
  options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0  
```

Create a local user account and add that user to “sudo”

  $ adduser "username"  
  $ adduser "username" sudo

Disable or lock the “root” account. Log in to the newly created account and execute the following
```
  $ sudo passwd -l root  
```

Raspbian is unofficial distribution of Debian compiled specifically for ARMv6 found in Raspberry Pi Models A, A+, B,
B+.

If you are using Raspberry Pi 2, you can bootstrap into official Debian 8 using a custom kernel. I would write up how to go about doing that in a future blog.

September 1, 2015

Raspbian (Jessie) netinstall on Raspberry Pi