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Setting up Raspbian on headless / Debian cross installation

Hello everybody

In the meantime I also got such a small device. For small background applications like a IPv6 tunnel router I am currently testing the headless mode.

Currently I used the way to download 2015-02-16-raspbian-wheezy.zip, unzip it and then write it to the MMC using "dd" which works successfully so far, i.e. after inserting the prepared card to the Raspberry Pi, it immediately gets its IPv4 address from my DHCP server (it's also a isc-dhcpd on a x86 Debian box) and I am able to login via SSH to continue work as expected.

On any x86/x64 PC/notebooks, I normally use the mini.iso Debian installation way where I can use partitioning for my requirements as well as setting up all important basic parameters like IP address, hostname, domain name, base package selection (my servers for example never use a GUI/X11 server) and so on. Since the Raspberry Pi has no possibilities to boot from a separate medium like the CD/DVD drive on any x86/x64 PC/notebook system, a nice way would be something like a cross installation which means that the setup routine itself runs on my Intel x86 machine but the packages are downloaded for ARM, i.e. I fully can prepare a MMC card for the first boot on my PC/notebook. => At the end, where the classic mini.iso installer says "Installation finished [Reboot system]" the cross installer should tell "Installation finished. MMC can be removed and inserted into the Raspberry Pi now" at the end.

Question: Is there a project for such an installation process?

Thanks in advance for any replies. :-)

Andreas

--
"127.0.0.1 was ist das? Ich kenne nur ::1!" - www.swissipv6council.ch
Reply to
Andreas Meile
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Is this what you need?

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Graham. 

%Profound_observation%
Reply to
Graham.

Dunno. Personally, I burn the iso to the SD card, plug it into the Pi, connect the Pi to my router, then my custom bash configuration script on my PC configures the Pi as I want it via SSH. That seems easiest to me.

Reply to
Dave Farrance

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is getting close.

gregor

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Reply to
gregor herrmann

Hello Gregor

"gregor herrmann" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@news.comodo.priv.at...

Thanks for the link, I tried it out.

But it's actually not what I am looking for because the actual setup process still runs on the Raspberry Pi itself. What I am looking for is a solution where I can start a setup tool on a regular x86 PC, then insert a _empty_ (means even the boot sector can be zeroed/fully unpartitioned state -> anything can be overwritten) SD card. The x86 based program then should do the formatting process, letting choose a partioning layout (for example separating /home, /usr, creating a swap partition and so on), creating the empty apt-get database, install all base packages, completing the working bootstrap part like GRUB on a regular PC, also asking all basic parameters like hostname, domain name, network setup (DHCP or manual parameters), country, timezone and language and base package set (This makes sense since the x86 processor is much faster than the ARM processor for large package installation processes when selecting a full X11 GUI desktop environment).

At the end, the setup tool should terminate, letting remove the SD card and boot the Raspberry Pi with a completely set-up system where only the fine-tuning like installing additional single packages, configuring them is necessary.

In short: Instead of only formating FAT32 (which seems the need very specific partitioning detail settings) and copying some files on the drive as the steps done on a x86 PC, I mean a full basic installation of it without image file.

Andreas

--
"127.0.0.1 was ist das? Ich kenne nur ::1!" - www.swissipv6council.ch
Reply to
Andreas Meile

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