Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
The last time I installed a new disk image on an SD Card for the Pi I had to use the Win32DiskImager util on Windows. Since I primarily use a Mac that took a few additional steps to get a working SD Card.
Looks like now though someone has scripted the steps to make this easier on a Mac. I used the RPiSDCardBuilder util and this seems to work fine.
I know this isn’t new news. but given the work I’ve been doing recently with the Raspberry Pi and since I recently got my ‘General’ Amateur Radio license, the fact that you can use the Raspberry Pi as a low power transmitter for the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) network I find fascinating. Definitely have to get myself setup to investigate some of these digital modes.
The memory allocation to the gpu is defined in /boot/config.txt using the gpu_mem property.
Minimum is 16, default is 64. If you’re running graphics intensive apps on the Pi you can increase this value. If you’re running in headless mode then you can decrease it to 16 or 32.
More info here.
Once you’ve copied one of the Debian disk images to an SD card, you may have noticed that the disk image is only for 2GB and you have a lot of unused space on your SD card. The raspi-config util has an option (Expand Root FS) to resize your root partition for you. There’s also plenty of other utils to do the job. I used gparted from a gparted LiveCD booted on my Mac to resize my partition and it worked well.