How to: Minibian on Raspberry Pi

Minibian is a small and lightweight Raspbian-based Linux image for Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi 2.
Minibian is using the stable distribution and is therefore fully compatible with official Raspbian image. However it does not include the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and other unneeded tools, like LibreOffice. This keeps the total space down to roughly 300-350 mb space and only 34 mb of ram when booted.
You will need a ethernet cable, as wifi is not included in the minibian image.

Step 1: Login on Raspberry Pi

After you have downloaded an installed minibian onto a microsd card (You can do that using SD Formatter V4 and win32 disk imager if using Windows).

user: root
password: raspberry

Change the password using passwd and enter your preferred password

passwd

Step 2: Install Necessary Tools on Minibian

As minibian is a bare raspberry pi image, it is missing some tools. Let us install nano, raspi-config, rpi-update and some usb utilities,

apt-get update<br>apt-get install nano rpi-update raspi-config usbutils dosfstools apt-utils

and install sudo, which let you use sudo on normal users that we will add later in this guide,

apt-get install sudo

Step 3: Run raspi-config

Run raspi-config

raspi-config

and choose 1) expand filesystem and 8) overclock if you want to play with that. Also if you want, you can change your hostname by going to 9) advanced options and A2) hostname.

Hit finish and restart your Raspberry Pi. Shouldn’t take more than 20-25 seconds to reboot.

Step 4: Change settings on Raspberry Pi

Step 4.1: Update Firmware on Raspberry Pi

Update the latest firmware by entering,

rpi-update

This might take a few minutes. A reboot is needed to activate the new firmware

reboot

Step 4.2: Setup Wifi in Raspberry Pi

If you need wireless go ahead and install the following packages,

apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree wireless-tools wpasupplicant

Step 4.3: Add User on Raspberry Pi

Next stop, adding a user. Let us go with the default pi user this time and make the pi user a sudo user. Go ahead and type

adduser pi<br>usermod -a -G sudo pi

Step 4.4: Cleanup Settings on Raspberry Pi

Clean up by typing in

apt-get clean

Reboot and login with your newly created user.
Now you have a fully working Raspberry Pi that only use roughly 34 mb of ram on initial startup.
Go ahead and install LAMP server on your Raspberry Pi 2 server now.