• Minimal Raspbian Pi

    A collection of notes for setting up a clean and minimal install of the official Raspbian image from raspberrypi.org.

    Comparison of compressed images

    826 MB - Original 2014-06-20-wheezy-raspbian
    284 MB - Additional packages added, desktop extras removed
    156 MB - Desktop environment removed, udisks-glue installed
    184 MB - As above, with mono installed

  • Making A Pi Disk Image

    After setting up the Raspberry Pi, it’s a good idea to make your own installation image from it. This mainly involves using the dd command to clone the SD card into a file. However, there are some extra steps that can be used to produce a smaller file, and to provide a helpful login message to anyone using the image.

  • Windows 8.1 - EFI install

    I recently wanted to test something on Windows, and not wanting to use a virtual machine, I decided to install Windows 8.1 on my MacBook.

    All Intel based Macs use EFI with a GUID partition table (GPT), instead of the traditional Wintel BIOS/MBR combination. Until recently, this has meant that Windows can only be installed by emulating an MBR disk, typically by using Apple’s Boot Camp to create the Windows partition.

    Since Windows 8 now supports installation under EFI1, and Boot Camp is fairly rigid about the placement of a Windows partition, I wanted to try installing Windows 8.1 using EFI and GPT just as I do with Mac OS X and Ubuntu.

    1. Windows 7 actually supports efi booting from CD, but the efi loader and related files were not included in the CD’s filesystem (there is a hack to work around this, but it doesn’t seem to work on my MacBook). ↩

  • Pi Box

    There’s currently no build of the Dropbox sync client that runs on ARM devices; while there is source available, it’s not suitable for automatic, unattended sync on a Raspberry Pi that may not have any windowing system installed.

    Dropbox does make various SDKs available though, which enables a ruby or python script to be used instead of the official client.

  • Home Theatre Pi (HTPi)

    A collection of notes for setting up a clean image of XBian (1.0 Beta 1) on the Raspberry Pi.