Hi!

I want to begin playing with Debian on my Smartbook, but I'm having trouble getting out of the gate. I've downloaded the armhf image, and have extracted it by doing:
Then I attempt to dd the image to a 8 GB smart media card in one of those USB adapters:
This never seems to finish. I'm doing this on a Mac Lion machine, I can attempt on a Debian box if I need to. Any ideas?

Basically, all I want is to get the netinstall on the Smartbook without anything else (just the standard system utilities and add all my stuff in post-install). I consider myself a power user, but working with these embedded devices has me thinking I'm not quite as capable as I thought I was! :)

As an aside, if anyone has a basic Debian install rootfs already cooked up, I would be forever your friend!

Thanks,

Josh

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Josh Lawrence

Hi,

Not using a Mac, but did you unmount the SD card first (as far as I remember, this is needed on a Mac). Try the following:


1.) Become root:

su

2.) Plug in your SD card and then use the following command to see which /dev/diskN node it's located on:

diskutil list

3.) Unmount the disk where "N" is the number of the disk taken from the above command:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN

If the above command was successful, you will see:

Unmount of all volumes on diskN was successful

4.) Use the 'dd' command to copy the image file to the entire disk:

dd if=image.img of=/dev/diskN

Keep in mind that this process can take quite some time (sometimes even 30 minutes), depending on the speed of your SD card etc. Leave it be just in case, it should either quit itself with an error, or finish with all ok...


Johan.

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Using bs=2048 (or up to bs=8192 if you're feeling lucky) can significantly lower the time it takes. :)

Hi - if you prefer to keep track of the SD card burning process then I can recommend 'usb-imagewriter' - a gui tool to write .img files to USB Keys.

It asks for a file, finds a likely destination, asks for confirmation, and just does it. Slowly.
But there is a progress bar and a time estimation number that is reasonably accurate on our system, ymmv!

It's in the Ubuntu Lucid repos, probably available elsewhere.

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Hand-crufted code