Bootable Raspbian Images by Hexxeh

Please Note: The Raspberry Pi Foundation has produced and released their own recommended image of Raspbian. All users are encouraged to download the Foundation image as it is the best supported image within the Raspberry Pi Forums. This "official" Raspbian image can be downloaded directly from the Raspberry Pi Website Downloads Page.

Hexxeh has produced a publicly available SD image of Raspbian that is bootable on Raspberry Pi hardware.

Because Raspbian packages are still being built, this image provides only minimal install of Raspbian that will boot to a command prompt. However, it is an excellent tool to use for testing hard float compilations, running benchmarks and debugging packages that are having problems building on the Raspbian autobuilders.

Download the Image

The 222 MB image can be downloaded from this link raspbian-r3.zip or by torrent.

Once booted, log into the 'root' account with the password 'hexxeh'.

Changes from the previous r2 image are as follows:

• SSH server included, launches on boot by default
• LXDE and Xorg server now included, type "startx" to launch this after logging in
• Changed the sources.list to point to the new raspbian.org address
• rpi-update is included (as is Git, since rpi-update requires this)
• Updated to the latest Raspberry Pi firmware and kernel as of 13th May

Some notes concerning this image:

• The image is shipped with OpenSSH server by default, it is very important to regenerate RSA/DSA keys:

  • rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* && dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

• Before starting to install stuff update the package lists in apt (otherwise you are likely to get a load of file not found errors)

  • apt-get update

• Icons for LXDE are missing, so run:

  • apt-get install lxde-icon-theme

• Time is not set, so run:

  • apt-get install ntp fake-hwclock

• Choose your timezone:

  • dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

• Configure locale settings:

  • apt-get install locales

    dpkg-reconfigure locales

• Configure keyboard settings:

  • apt-get install console-setup keyboard-configuration

    dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

• The image is quite minimal. If you want a load of old-fassioned unix style cruft installed issue the following commands as root. This will install about 100 additional "standard" Linux packages.

  • apt-get install tasksel

    tasksel install standard

• Some problems have been reported when using tasksel not being able to install packages. If you encounter errors, add the following line to the file /etc/sysctl.conf, reboot and try running tasksel again:

  • vm.min_free_kbytes = 8192

  This tells the kernel to try and keep 8MB of RAM free at all times. It's useful on swap-less machines, where you don’t want incoming network traffic to overwhelm the kernel and force an OOM before it has time to flush any buffers.

Using the Image

To use an image file, you will need to unzip it and write it to a suitable SD card using the UNIX tool dd. Windows users should use Win32DiskImager. Do not try to drag and drop or otherwise copy over the image without using dd or Win32DiskImager – it won’t work. If you’re still not clear on what to do, the community on the Raspberry Pi Wiki has written a guide for beginners on how to set up your SD card.

Keeping Up to Date

You can use the standard Debian way to update your installation:

• apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

To get the newest kernel and firmware, rpi-update is included in this image.

Just run the following command:

• rpi-update

rpi-update will only work after time has been set. Install ntp as described above or set the time with ntpdate:

• apt-get install ntpdate

  ntpdate uk.pool.ntp.org