Raspbian

Raspbian is a project to create a hard float port of debian for the Raspberry Pi and similar devices which use ARMv6 processors with VFPv2. The official Debian armhf packages are built with ARMv7, VFPv3_D16 and Thumb2. So they are not suitable for the Pi and similar devices. To get round this we have to change the compiler defaults (easy) and recompile everything (harder than it sounds).

Infrastructure has been set-up for building packages. We aim to stay as close to Debian wheezy as possible but we will pull in packages from sid and/or make our own modifications when we deem it necessary.

A chroot can be bootstrapped from a Debian squeeze armel installation using the following commands (replace /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi with where you want your chroot).

debootstrap --arch=armhf wheezy /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian cd /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi wget http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian.public.key chroot /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi mount -t proc proc /proc apt-key add raspbian.public.key apt-get update

If you just want to install the minimum number of packages add a --variant=minbase to the bootstrap command

Since this is running in a chroot you probably don't want it attempting to start and stop services when you update packages. To avoid this create a file /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d with the following commands cat << EOD >/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d echo "rc.d operations disabled for chroot" exit 101 EOD chmod 0755 /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
 * 1) !/bin/sh

Modified packages
Note: this list is incomplete