Quick guide: Running stock Debian on the Raspberry Pi 2

Posted on

At the time of writing, the ‘Raspbian’ port of Debian is often used on the Raspberry Pi. It was created to match the CPU architecture, for better performance. These reasons don’t apply to the newer Raspberry Pi 2, so if you’re a Debian desktop or server user, you can do away with the fork and just run Debian Jessie armhf.

The info from Debian is: https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi2

A bit more background about why this only applies to the Raspberry Pi 2-

  • The Raspberry Pi 1 uses ARMv6 chipset with hard floats
    • The Debian armhf port requires ARMv7
    • The Debian armel port doesn’t use hard floats, so is unnecessarily slow on the Pi.
    • So Raspbian was created for the Raspberry Pi 1’s ARMv6 w/ hard-floats, and gets the most juice out of the CPU on the Raspberry Pi 1.
  • The Raspberry Pi 2 uses ARMv7 with hard floats, so Debian armhf port is fine.

Install the image

Image is linked to from this page:

I will assume that your machine has an SD card slot. To find the device name, list out disks and look for one of the correct size, which appears when you plug in the card:

df

Download a copy of the image, extract it out, and dd the file on to the card:

wget -c https://images.collabora.co.uk/rpi2/jessie-rpi2-20150705.img.gz
gunzip jessie-rpi2-20150705.img.gz 
sudo dd if=jessie-rpi2-20150705.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M
sudo sync
umount /media/$USER/*

Plug in the Raspberry pi, and then log in. If you are using SSH, then arp-scan is a good tool to pick up devices on the network:

sudo apt-get install arp-scan
sudo arp-scan -l
ssh root@x.y.z.w

Configure pi- Things like screen resolution and HDMI go here:

cd /boot/firmware/
nano config.txt

Perform a software upgrade:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

Start fixing security defaults. Remember that this is not a clean install, so start by setting your own passwords:

passwd

Check that there are no other accounts with passwords set:

cat /etc/shadow

Regenerate all SSH Server keys (commands from here):

ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key -N '' -t ecdsa -b 521
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key -N '' -t dsa
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N '' -t rsa

Lastly, generate some locales:

sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8 en_GB en_GB.UTF-8