I would like to have a command line based OS, I don't want to use a GUI, in my case it would be enough to just have a command line based OS, so the system can be faster and tinier. How can I create customized Debian before I burn it to an SD card?
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4Use Arch Arm Linux instead. That will just be a command line OS on installation. – Jivings Jul 13 '12 at 15:37
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possible duplicate of Is it possible to update, upgrade and install software before flashing an image? – Alex Chamberlain Jul 13 '12 at 15:47
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The Arch Arm Linux also a solution, but for me it's still to much the 200MB – Mokus Jul 13 '12 at 16:14
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Ubuntu will not support ARMv6. See: Can I install Ubuntu? – Alex Chamberlain Jul 13 '12 at 16:31
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@iUngi I totally agree. There needs to be a smaller distro. However, you wont find it in Debian. – Jivings Jul 13 '12 at 21:48
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1If 200MB is too much, what size are you targeting? – bobstro Feb 17 '17 at 21:24
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(Comment timer prevented adding this...) Do you need audio, video or network capabilities? The Raspbian Jessie Lite still weighs in over 1.6GB, but there are a number of packages you can remove depending on your needs. Easy enough to boot it, remove what you don't need, then create an image. Samba & Avahi are candidates. Compilers and dev tools possibly. – bobstro Feb 17 '17 at 21:31
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If you're prepared to use Arch instead, then you can download it and mount it locally as a loopback device, on your Arch desktop PC. You can then use your desktop's copy of pacman to remove all the packages you don't want from the RasPi image.
Once that's done you can create an image just the size you want, and copy onto it the files from your cut-down version of Arch.
But note that Arch ARM doesn't actually take up the 2GB image that you download, most of that is free space. The system only takes up about 490MB, but you can certainly reduce that if you remove packages you won't use.
If you don't have an Arch desktop PC, or you want to stick with Debian, the easiest way (avoiding emulators) is to write it to a large SD card, then boot into it and remove all the packages you don't want. When it's down to the size you require, put the SD card back into your PC and copy the distro onto the small SD card you want to use permanently.
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