Raspbian Wheezy armhf Raspberry Pi minimal image

After the Debian Wheezy armel image I made a new one based on Raspbian armhf. This one is compiled with hard float support, so basically floating point operations are MUCH faster because they are done in hardware instead of software emulation :)

Features include:

  • A minimal Raspbian Wheezy installation (similar to a netinstall)
  • Hard Float binaries: floating point operations are done in hardware instead of software emulation, that means higher performances
  • Disabled incremental updates, means apt-get update is much faster
  • Workaround for a kernel bug which hangs the Raspberry Pi under heavy network/disk loads
  • 3.6.11+ hardfp kernel with latest raspberry pi patches
  • Latest version of the firmwares
  • Fits 1GB SD cards
  • A very tiny 118MB image: even with a 2GB SD there is a lot of free space
  • ssh starts by default
  • The clock is automatically updated using ntp
  • IPv6 support
  • Just 14MB of ram usage after the boot

Here is the link to download my custom image:

http://files2.linuxsystems.it/raspbian_wheezy_20140726.img.7z – London, UK
Checksum MD5: 1be9af7fcec38c7238229edf1c5cdb3c

Mirrors:
7zip: md5sum(1be9af7fcec38c7238229edf1c5cdb3c) – File size: 144MB
http://mirrors.node1.hadrill.org.uk/darkbasic/raspbian_wheezy_20140726.img.7z – Amsterdam, Netherlands (1)
https://debianer.puppis.uberspace.de/files/RaspberryPi/raspbian_wheezy_hardfp_20140726.img.7z – Frankfurt, Germany

You will have to extract the image with p7zip:

7za x raspbian_wheezy_20130923.img.7z

Then flash it to your SD with dd:

dd bs=1M if=raspbian_wheezy_20130923.img of=/dev/sdX

Finally, if you have an sd larger than 1GB, grow the partition with gparted (first move the swap partition at the end).

The root password is raspberry.

 

You will have to reconfigure your timezone after the first boot:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

The keyboard layout:

dpkg-reconfigure console-data

And the localization:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

 

It’s done, I hope you will enjoy it.

731 comments to Raspbian Wheezy armhf Raspberry Pi minimal image

  • txt.file

    Great work. This image suits my needs for a small but fully functional image very well. Thank you.

  • […] I’ve started investigating the http://thethingbox.io/ image – they say ‘Just download and write a Raspberry-Pi binary file on a SD card to get it ready!’ Well, that’s mostly true – but I found a few issues once I logged on to it via ssh that I’ve documented here, mostly easy to fix once you know how. I’ll carry on extending and refining this post as I get more familiarity with this image. It’s based on http://www.linuxsystems.it/raspbian-wheezy-armhf-raspberry-pi-minimal-image/. […]

  • Lorenzo

    Thank you! Very useful!

    Lorenzo

  • nibbler

    Perfect!

    Did you think of providing another version with the RT-Preempt Patch applied? Would be nice!

  • TeKo

    Exactly what I was looking for.

    One small thing, I want to install “python-rpi.gpio” but I get “Unable to locate package python-rpi.gpio”.

    The library should be in the sources right?

    Everything else seems to work great so far.

  • Nelson

    Hello, nice image.

    I’m trying the minimal system with Midori (browser) and matchbox (window manager) to get it to work. Now when I start one of the two, always comes he can not open the display. I have also matchbox, midori, x11vnc, x11-xserver-utils, unclutter and xinit installed.

  • stewe93

    Hy, can anyone help me , i want to install a minimal xorg configuration but after install (apt-get install xorg) when I “startx” it gives me the console but cant write anythink in it , and “Xorg -configure” doesnt work too . Pls i really want to use this img but i need X

    • stewe93

      *anything* ( keyboard doesnt work)

      • Neo Conker

        Hello there!

        You must specify a Desktop Manager first. I think that you want a slim GUI, so you can use maybe twm or openbox.
        #> apt-get install openbox
        #> exit
        #> startx
        Now you need a mouse and click with the secondary button to get a small menu, and the first option will be a xterminal.
        In case that you want test with twm, click with the primary button in the mouse and you get also a menu.
        If you want an extensive menu then you must install also menu package:
        #> apt-get install menu

        Restart your GUI with a exit or only restart your RPi. When you return to the GUI, you menu will show a Debian option.

        Greetings

        • stewe93

          Thank you very much bro , it saved my life , im not a linux expert :) is there any way to get only a command line like xserver with working keyboard ? cause i want to build a carpc , and i want to do it as fast as possible .

          • Neo Conker

            Hello stewe93!
            May be you must try adding a command like xterm on a script file in the cron daemon or maybe on the file ~/.bashrc.
            If you are using Openbox, you can specify keys to invoke commands, check for rc.xml file on its site.

  • jab

    hi,

    i noticed one issue today. everytime i reboot my pi, it resets time date to 1 jan 1970.
    i changed etc/ntp.conf to 8.8.8.8.
    restarted ntpd. still no luck. I manually set the time on pi.
    Rebooted it.. still same issue

    I am using my pi with wifi card. No ethernet card plugged in.

    Any one facing same issue.

    P.S My image is – Linux raspberry-pi 3.12.25+ #700

    TIA
    Jab

    • i am facing the same issue
      i have tried to set the time on pi manually,then rebooted it.it remains 1 jan 1970.
      my image file is raspbian_wheezy_20140726.img

    • Neo Conker

      Hello there!!

      May be you should configure a Time Zone. Why not try the following?:
      #> dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
      In there select your zone and city. At exit the same application, it puts the date-time for your timezone selected and the UTC date-time.
      Try restart after that. If that works for you, you’ll see the date-time desired.

      Greetings

      • i have changed time zone and the issue remains
        maybe ntpd service works not very well,i think

        • AndiC

          Noticed the same – after a reboot the first entries in the syslog are dated 1970. That’s because the Pi got no HW clock and the ntp service gets started after the syslog service.

          Here’s my fix:
          Installed ntpdate
          Added a line for my local time server to /etc/hosts e.g. “192.168.1.1 timesource”.
          Added a line in /etc/init.d/rsyslog to run ntpdate before syslog gets started. This will only work at boot time because later the ntp service is already running and locking the ntp port. So that’s why I redirected all output of ntpdate to /dev/null.

          do_start()
          {
          DAEMON="$RSYSLOGD_BIN"
          DAEMON_ARGS="$RSYSLOGD_OPTIONS"
          PIDFILE="$RSYSLOGD_PIDFILE"

          # run ntpdate once to set the clock
          ntpdate timesource >/dev/null 2>&1

          # Return
          # 0 if daemon has been started
          # 1 if daemon was already running
          # other if daemon could not be started or a failure occured
          start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_ARGS
          }

  • jab

    I fixed my NTP problem.
    I have configured ethernet card with a static local IP (only for initial installation/configuration).
    My wifi USB nano card is the main NIC I use my pi for connecting to internet.
    Somehow my ethernet card was being treated as default router in ‘netstat -r’.
    My Ethernet is always un-plugged. I only connect a cable to PI if I have to re-install it.
    I removed the configured gateway from /etc/network/interfaces.
    Rebooted it and voila. My time is syncing now correctly.

    To verify it, I again enabled the gateway entry for eth0. Rebooted and time/date switched back to 1 Jan 1970.

    Hope it helps others.
    Cheers,
    Jab

  • dave

    Does it work with ModelB+
    Will Pygame run on it?
    Will LighttPd run?

  • Adrian

    Hi, What’s the last version available?

  • tonio10

    amazing job! I will try to improve the image if I can! that’s really cool! continue on this way!!

  • John

    Thanks for sharing! I used this as the base for my Raspberry PI router. One thought: would it make sense to set gpu_mem=16 in config.txt since this is a minimal command line only image?

  • Andrew

    For first, thank you this great image, i am happy about to use it. My only problem is, i am a bit confused about some conception, and would ask for tipps.

    I found “/dev/mmcblk0p3″ as swap. If i turn it out (i think simple remove that line in /etc/fstab, is that enough?), could that make any problem?

    I found main partition as ext4. Ext4 mostly uses journaling. Is it turned off? Or writeback cached?

    We have some log in the system. In case i would like to use image 7/24/365, will that fulfill sd card? For example “/var/log/messages”. Is it possible to redirect all the log messages to /dev/null?

  • Ricardo JL Rufino

    Please add this info in tutorial.

    – Add oficial raspberrypi repo

    echo “deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy main” >> /etc/apt/sources.list
    wget http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/raspberrypi.gpg.key
    apt-key add raspberrypi.gpg.key
    apt-get update

    it’s required to install java
    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-jdk

  • […] habe ein kleineres Raspian (dieses hier) genommen, da ich nur eine 2GB SD-Karte grade zur Hand hatte. Es kann sein, dass bei anderen […]

  • Vasily

    Hello. Tell me please, is there MMC driver on kernel?
    I burn image on my 1gb mmc card and got error:
    mmc0: error -84 whilst initialising MMC card
    Tell me plese is it possible to boot from mmc?
    Thanks!

  • mikewop

    Hello,
    thank you for this kernel image.
    Does it have the SPI module built in?
    When I try to do “modprobe spi-dev” it just says “Module spi-dev not found”.
    “modprobe spidev” gives no error, but then the spi module is not listed when doing “lsmod”.
    Thanks!

  • Eugene

    Hi,

    Didn’t started on A-model due to timeout on filesystem mount

  • axel

    Hallo, Your Image working well on 1 of my RPi. Its Small and without X. Thanks a lott. But after all changes I need for My Project I recognise that networking only working on this one of my 6 RPis.
    They start normaly but ifconfig shows only lo: and “ifconfig eth0 up” shows “no device eth0″.
    Can someone helps me?
    thanks

    • Neo Conker

      Hello there!
      Maybe you are using and sharing the SD cards in several rpis. If this is true then you must edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. You must see several lines with all the Mac address from any RPI used with the card. Only delete them and restart your rpi. After that you will see your eth0 up and working.
      Greetings

  • Peter

    Did you configure on one pi – say – a Pi model B, and the ones that are not working are the B+ model (or the opposite way around)?

    also have a look at http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/110496/cloned-linux-system-and-etc-udev-rules-d-70-persistent-net-rules, it may apply.

  • axel

    Hallo Neo Conker – Thats right, now its working fine – thank you very much – :) axel

  • Gabe

    Hi guys. I’m having a slight problem.
    After flashing the SD card, installing the image, and putting it into the raspberry pi, the only light that turns on on the pi is the red light. Nothing else works now. Nothing shows up on the screen either. SSH times out.

    Has this happened to anyone else? Any suggestions?

    • Gabe

      I guess I should add some details.

      I am using OS X. I also have not run gparted on the image because there doesn’t seem to be a distribution for OSX.

      I am also in New York, and am using the London, UK download, if that makes any difference.

      • Sam

        Hmm. Can you boot the GParted linux live distribution from a USB drive, then use that to check the partitions for errors? I suspect something went wrong when the image was written.

        I shouldn’t think the download location matters, as long as the MD5 checksum matches what darkbasic listed above (and which I reproduced here for the latest image).

        1be9af7fcec38c7238229edf1c5cdb3c raspbian_wheezy_20140726.img.7z

        • Sam

          I mean to say that you should try to boot GParted on a usb attached to your Mac, then use it to check the sd card which should also be plugged into the Mac.

          The problem that might arise here is that booting from usb can be a bit of a pain, so it may be easier just to erase the sd completely and rewrite the image onto it.

  • Lorenzo Simoncello

    Great work!

    Only a question:

    Why the partition table is differente from the original Raspbian?

    Case original Raspbian:
    /dev/mmcblk0p1 Id=c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
    /dev/mmcblk0p2 Id=83 Linux

    Case armhf Raspberry Pi minimal image:
    /dev/mmcblk0p1 Id=b W95 FAT32
    /dev/mmcblk0p2 Id=83 Linux
    /dev/mmcblk0p3 Id=82 Linux Swap

    Is a good choice to have a Linux Swap partition in a system without a true hard disk? (remember that Raspberry has only the SD Card).

    Regards

    • darkbasic

      Because I created the image from scratch and because the original pi had half the ram. In the next image I will remove the swap partition.

  • Lorenzo Simoncello

    Ok, many thanks!
    For fixing the actual image, I try:

    1. swapoff -a
    2. comment last /etc/fstab line (swap) for next reboot
    3. (optional) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0p3 blank the swap partition
    4. fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
    5. p print partition table
    6. d 3 delete the swap partition /dev/mmcblk0p3
    7. reboot

    Do you think is right?

    Is possibile now to resize the /dev/mmcblk0p2 to expand filesystem? Any suggestion?

    Thanks in advance

  • Hello,

    I just push raspbian_wheezy_20140726.img to SD card.
    then i run
    aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade -y
    aptitude install rfkill hostapd hostap-utils iw dnsmasq -y

    I have problems to get up working my TP-LINK TL-WN722N adapter which uses ath9k_htc driver.
    This adapter is pretty much supported on wheezy raspbian out of the box.

    when i run lsusb i really see this adapter but it is not assigned as wlan0.
    I have another adapter RT5370 which works pretty well.

    I would like to get running this TP-LINK TL-WN722N on this compact image.
    Any tips will be appreciate.

  • ltorok

    Make update your minimal image from official Rasbian image from 2014-09-09 (Version: September 2014), please… Thanks.

  • Could you update this for the September image and enable the official repos by default?

  • Could you also move /dev/root so we can expand the file system using raspi-config

  • […] removed). The 3 Slave Pi’s will run a minimal installation of Raspbian Wheezy available here and mirrored on my site […]

  • Robert

    Fantastic initiative !!! I needed to setup a very minimal headless RPi with just NTP, NFS, SSH and Deluge (daemon and web interface) and all was up in no time !
    I only have a STRANGE problem.
    I need to change eth0 IP from DHCP as in your untouched image to a static IP in my subnet.
    I am pretty sure I am not making errors:
    change the dhcp word to static in /etc/network/interfaces
    add the address, mask, gateway, network and broadcast values under it.

    but when I reboot I cannot find the headless server nor at the static I just specified nor at a DHCP address ….

    To fix I mount the SD into my Ubuntu box, reedit the file and put back dhcp and all goes well with eth0 getting the usual DHCP address.

    Any ideas ????????? Thanks a lot and ciao from Roma ! :-)

  • Hi, I downloaded the image today and ran into a problem with it. The hostname was messed up and thus I could not log into it. I had to mount the image onto my main computer and ediit the etc/hostname file, using linux it ahad to be done as root (or via sudo)

    Thanks.

  • tovis

    Great job! Thank you.
    I was unable to find what building/development environment you were used. Could you show where to find (may be write) explanation for building environment?

  • Jarno

    Hello, how can I extend my disk space? On Raspbian I could do raspi-config and extend it, this is not possible with this distro.

  • Oscar

    Hi, I’ve got the OS loading, but when I try to log in it won’t accept the details, am I doing this right?

    raspberry-pi login: pi
    Password: raspberry

  • Thank you very much! This image saved a lot of my time!

  • Hi, that’s Works fine on pi b+.

    how i can:
    * configure a wifi adapter (chipset rtlink 5320) with wpa ? (detected when plugged in & create wlan0)device.

    * set a minimal X env ?
    * configure keyboard to brazilian abnt2
    * i have a 2gb sd card; how i can resize to use it (diff space)
    * it’s recommended use a usb charge of my cell nokia lumia (5v 500ma) OR a more power (1, 2A amps) ?

    THANKS FOR ANY

  • Denis

    have support to fbtft ? ( https://github.com/notro/fbtft )
    where is found the kernel configuration ? ( i will need add a custom kernel driver/patch )

    is possible install image on usb sticky?
    is possible automount a usb disk ( automount ) on a fix directory, p. ex., /mnt/stickid

    suggest: minor change on filesystem
    1. /boot
    2. /root
    3. swap
    4. /
    * non-partited space *

    (to possible expand/autoexpand via resize2fs )

  • Dat

    I had the minibian installed and running since around Christmas last week and everything went smoothly. I got to say, though, that having set up Arch Linux a week earlier helped me gain the knowledge and experience to get everything working on this minimal image. My first priority was getting it networked with WiFi. And since I don’t have access to the router, I had to configure my PC to share internet through its ethernet port to the Pi. Tip: if you’re connecting to a WPA network, you MUST install wpasupplicant. I keep things simple by just editing /etc/network/interfaces and reboot. Thank goodness the wireless drivers were available and up to date for my device, saving me from having to deal with fetching that.

  • torstenL

    for newbees like me it should be mentioned, that login to wheezy via ssh terminal is not
    pi@192.168… passw: raspberry
    but..
    root@192.168… passw: raspberry
    check router for pi-IP adress if connected with ethernet
    on my mac:
    MacBookAir:~ torstenlu$ ssh root@192.168.1.5

    this stupid mistake took me 1hour of ‘research’

    cheers

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    at the minute but I have bookmarked it and also added your
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  • Denis

    This image works on usb stick -normally- just fix /boot/cmdline.txt

    do can do it from windows ;]

    original:
    root@pi:/var/www/php-stomp# cat /boot/cmdline.txt
    dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait ipv6.disable=1

    usb:
    dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait ipv6.disable=1

  • […] For the Raspberry Pi a debian wheezy image can be obtained from: http://www.linuxsystems.it/raspbian-wheezy-armhf-raspberry-pi-minimal-image/ […]

  • Fw190

    Got your image running on a 4 gig Sd card; all went beautifully until I wanted to install deluged and I got the message:”No space left on device”.
    Do I have to go thrrough GParted to expand the partition since there seems to be no raspi-config…?

  • James

    Thank for the post :-) i love ubuntu/debian OS but i didn’t want all the overhead of the gui this is perfect!

  • Mar

    Hi, the image doesnot fit onto my 1GB MicroSD Card. Would it be possible to reduce 1MB?
    Br.

    DiskStation> dd bs=1M if=raspbian_wheezy_20140726.img of=/dev/sdq
    dd: writing `/dev/sdq': No space left on device
    943+0 records in
    942+0 records out
    987758592 bytes (988 MB) copied, 139.519 s, 7.1 MB/s

  • jrem

    Not all 1g cards are 1g . . . the vary a little bit.

    So put it on a bigger card, then use gparted to change the sizes, and dd each partition to the other card.

    This does work as I have done it.

  • Hi,

    Great work !
    Just installed your image after having strugled with a standard Raspbian to get a decent remote desktop working…
    Your image is faster and lighter and comes with the bare minimal software.
    You could include a guideline on how to extend the root partition to the size of the SD Card from the command line.

    Thanks again,

    Fred

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