Installing Fedora - Practical Raspberry Pi - page 18

Dissecting the Image
First you're going to need two critical pieces of hardware:

• An SD card, or a few of them, with a minimum size of 2 GB. This size will just get you up and

running but will leave you only a few 100 MB of space. I would suggest 4 GB as a good starting size.

• An SD card reader and writer. I use Linux to build all my SD cards. I don't own a Windows or

a Mac machine so you may need to change your method to build the SD card if you are using
a Windows or Mac machine.

So let's get down and build the SD card. What's exactly on this SD card image we're about to work with? It's a bit
of mystery for the first-time user of the Raspberry Pi. What exactly needs to go on the SD card? Well, not much really.
The Fedora image you get will have all the necessary files as well as special files in /boot .
Everything that you need to have a fully functional system is included. You may want to change some of the
settings or adjust the memory assignment via the files in /boot . No matter how you look at it, the image is a full
operating-system image. It's a little different from, say, using an install CD. You won't get to pick the packages you
want to install. You get an already configured operating system. All you are doing is placing this image on the SD card.
Fedora has a nice little installer for many different operating systems. For the Linux users out there, myself
included, there are two main ways to get the Fedora image on your SD card:

• A GUI installer

• At the command line

Using the GUI Installer
The first and most widely used method is the GUI installer, using an application called faii . You can download it from
either of the following places:

http://raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/fedora •

http://rpi.horan.hk •

The installer is a Python script and most distributions will come with Python so there is no need to worry about
dependencies on the script. Here's how you use it:

Download a copy of the faii-1.0.0.tar.gz tarball to your machine and extract it. 1.

Once you have extracted it you should see an executable called fedora-arm-installer .
You may need to open this executable first. If you are running Fedora or Ubuntu, make
sure you also have the python-qt4 package installed, otherwise the GUI will not launch.
Now if you run this you will get a nice little GUI pop up, as seen in Figure 2-1 .

2.