This post will explain how to install a minimal Raspbian OS to a 1 or 2 GB SD card, the original article can be found at the bottom of the page as well as at this link here.
First off you need to download the minimal Raspbian install from here, then if using a 2 GB card you can use a program such as “Startup Disk Creator” in Ubuntu to flash it to the card, if using a 1GB SD card you will need to use the dd (or dcfldd check my post here to see the difference) command like so :
$ sudo dd bs=1m if=/PATH/TO/FILE of=/dev/sdX && sync
Substituting “/PATH/TO/FILE” and “/dev/sdX” with the relevant information, so for me it looked like this :
$ sudo dd bs=1M if=/home/mic/Downloads/raspbian_wheezy_20130923.img of=/dev/sdc && sync
Once this is completed your SD card is ready to be booted, however if you installed on a 2 GB SD card then there is one more step you will need to complete first.
Run gparted and select the appropriate drive for your SD card, right click on the “Swap” partition and click “Resize/Move”. You should be greeted with a bar with your swap partition and the empty space, click the centre of the swap partition and drag it to the end of the free space (to the right) and then confirm the change, then right click on your second partition (sdc2 or something similar it should be ext4 filesystem type), then click “Resize/Move”. You will be greeted by a similar screen as to before, however instead of clicking the middle of the bar, go to the right hand side and drag the edge towards the end of the free space, you should see the partition grow in size, confirm these changes. You will now need to apply these changes to the SD card and then safely remove before inserting in to your Pi.
When booted you should be able to login with the details :
Username = root
Password = raspberry
You may need to reconfigure a few settings with these 3 commands :
$ dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
$ dpkg-reconfigure console-data
$ dpkg-reconfigure locales
Then all you need to do is update/upgrade with these 2 commands (1 GB SD cards may struggle with space issues so moving the /root partition to a USB stick/HD might be a good idea) :
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get upgrade
After this all you need to do is create a new user and install sudo, etc so you can use it. This is a very minimal installation and comes with no GUI ! Check out this post for some Command line based web browsers. I will be uploading the backup i make of my OS image from this post to my sourceforge page here, feel free to use it but note it will only fit on a 2 GB SD card (check the readme). Enjoy !
Mic's Linux Experience 