Installing Raspbian Lite on an SD Card

Raspberry Pi · Linux · Nov 27, 2019

Updated on Dec 1, 2019

This article contains a list of steps and notes on installing Raspbian Lite on an SD card. I often document some tasks for future reference and I’ve just got five more Raspberry Pi’s for my new project, which means that installing Raspbian Lite might be a thing I’ll probably need to repeat from time to time.

Step 1: Downloading Raspbian Lite

Raspbian Lite can be downloaded from the official website: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Some people prefer to do it from the command line, but I’m not sure if this method is reliable. I’ve tried it a few times and it never succeeded. You may try it if you’re feeling lucky:

curl -o raspbian-lite-latest.zip https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest

The official website offers two download options: direct link and torrent link. I tried direct link first and it gave me about 200 kB/s, which is quite slow even for my modest 100 Mbit/s connection. Torrent option boosted the download speed to about 5 MB/s which is far more pleasant.

Direct download speed: 200,000 B/s
Bandwidth: 10,125,000 B/s
Bandwidth Utilization: 1.98%

Torrent download speed: 5,000,000 B/s
Bandwidth: 10,125,000 B/s
Bandwidth Utilization: 49.38%

Raspbian comes in heavily compressed form so we need to unzip the downloaded file in order to get an .img image that we can write on SD cards:

unzip 2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.zip

ls -lh

-rw-r--r-- 1 igor igor 2.1G Sep 26 07:24 2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 igor igor 434M Nov 23 16:25 2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.zip

Step 2: Writing Raspbian Lite Image on SD Card

First, you have to find the device name of your SD card. I have an internal card reader in my laptop, so it always appear at /dev/mmcblk0 but it can be different if you’re using an external card reader. You should also make sure that the SD card is unmounted (umount it, if necessary).

sudo dd status=progress \
  if=2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img \
  of=/dev/mmcblk0

Be patient, it can take a while. That’s why it’s good to use status=progress, we can see the progress and be assured that dd did not just hang and stuck in inactive state.

289411584 bytes (289 MB, 276 MiB) copied, 50 s, 5.8 MB/s ...

Finally, we should see something like that:

2247615488 bytes (2.2 GB, 2.1 GiB) copied, 396 s, 5.7 MB/s 
4390912+0 records in
4390912+0 records out
2248146944 bytes (2.2 GB, 2.1 GiB) copied, 400.327 s, 5.6 MB/s

That should be it. Let’s check what do we have now on that SD card:

lsblk --fs

NAME                 FSTYPE      LABEL  UUID                                   FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0                                                                                       
├─mmcblk0p1          vfat        boot   xxxx-xxxx                               200.3M    21% /media/igor/boot
└─mmcblk0p2          ext4        rootfs xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx    633.1M    59% /media/igor/rootfs

It looks like we need two partitions: first one is used by Raspberry Pi to boot up and the second one hosts the operating system and all of the data owned by its users.

sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device         Boot  Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1        8192  532479  524288  256M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      532480 4390911 3858432  1.9G 83 Linux

Note that those partitions do not take up all of the free space on the SD card. The second partition will be expanded automatically once you boot up your Raspberry Pi.

df -h

Filesystem                Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1            253M   52M  201M  21% /media/igor/boot
/dev/mmcblk0p2            1.8G  1.1G  634M  64% /media/igor/rootfs

Step 3: First Run on a Raspberry Pi

Now you can plug your SD card into Raspberry Pi board and fire it up. The default log in credentials are:

User: pi
Password: raspberry

The first thing you may want to look at is the raspi-config utility. You can find more information here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/raspi-config.md

This program will help you to change your password, host name, enable Wi-Fi and SSH, and do many other things you may find necessary in order to fully utilize your Raspberry Pi.

Let’s see how our partitions look now:

lsblk --fs

NAME                 FSTYPE      LABEL  UUID                                   FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0                                                                                       
├─mmcblk0p1          vfat        boot   xxxx-xxxx                               199.6M    21% /media/igor/boot
└─mmcblk0p2          ext4        rootfs xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx     26.6G     4% /media/igor/rootfs

sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device         Boot  Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1        8192   532479   524288  256M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      532480 62333951 61801472 29.5G 83 Linux

df -h

Filesystem                Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1            253M   53M  200M  21% /media/igor/boot
/dev/mmcblk0p2             29G  1.3G   27G   5% /media/igor/rootfs

All fine, I guess we’re done here.

Conclusion

Raspbian Lite is a great system for running a server on a Raspberry Pi 4. It’s officially supported and it also has some unique features that are critical in order to make sure that you fully utilize your Raspberry Pi (primarily rpi-eeprom-update). Raspbian Lite is pretty compact and easy to install and the steps above provide some details on how the installation process might look like.