Raspberry Pi – first boot
Today I finally had a chance to burn a Linux image to an SD card and boot up my Raspberry Pi.
I downloaded the and burned the Raspian “wheezy” distro from the Raspberry Pi homepage. it booted up fine and took me through a simple setup before rebooting and then finally coming up into a neat X session. Raspian is based on Debian which I’m not overly familiar with. once it was up and running it took about 15 minutes to get bored of that.
I then went hunting and found that there are several other distros tailored to the Raspberry Pi. When it comes to Linux I’m a fan or Red Hat and all it’s derivatives, so was delighted to find that there is a Fedora Remix available. The current release is based on Fedora 14 and the team behind it are already working on the next release which will be based on the up to date Fedora 17.
Finding the Fedora 14 Remix wasn’t easy so here is the link I used:
http://files.velocix.com/c1410/images/fedora/14/r1-06-03-2012/raspberrypi-fedora-remix-14-r1.img.gz
Burning the image to SD card
I tried to write the remix img file to SD card 3 times using fedora-arm-installer-1.0.0 but it failed each time. I then switched to Plan B which was to extract the img file from the raspberrypi-fedora-remix-14-r1.img.gz and use win32diskimager to burn the image to the SD card – success!
First boot
So I inserted the SD card and plugged in my micro USB power supply. the system booted quite quickly and after a few questions the system rebooted, resized it’s partition to fill the SD card and came back to a console prompt.
No X
During the initial boot I chose to not start the system in X each time it booted, so it came up to a console. So once I’d logged in I typed startx in the console 10 seconds alter I had some nasty error messages and a bombed out X session. I tried typing X which got further but still no X. A quick Google soon gave me a 3rd option – init 5 which will take you out of the current run level (3) and take you to run level 5 (multiuser GUI).
Success !
In: Hardware, Raspberry Pi · Tagged with: hardware, linux, Raspberry Pi