How to Upgrade Minibian for Raspberry Pi 3 + Image •

Minibian is my favorite minimal distro for running headless Raspberry Pi servers. Previously I have shown how to make some tweaks to the original Minibian image, these are integrated into my customized Minibian image. Since Raspbian Jessie, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a lite version but it is not light enough for my needs and has some locale issues out of the box (here's the fix). Since I continue to use Minibian, this tutorial will show you how to upgrade Minibian to work with the Raspberry Pi 3. I have provided the working Minibian image that is compatible with these tested Raspberry Pi models: Raspberry Pi Model B+, Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3.

Pi Unit	Processor	RAM	RAM Bus	Network	WiFi	USB	SATA	Cost
Raspberry Pi 3	1.2 GHz ARMv8 Quad Core	1 GB DDR2	450 MHz	100 Mbit	Yes	4	No	$35
Raspberry Pi 2	900 MHz ARMv7 Quad Core	1 GB DDR2	450 MHz	100 Mbit	No	4	No	$35.00
Raspberry Pi	700 MHz ARMv6 Single Core	512 MB SDRAM	400 MHz	100 Mbit	No	4	No	$25
Banana Pi	1 GHz ARMv7 Dual Core	1 GB DDR3	432 MHz	Gigabit	No	2	Yes	$36.99
Banana Pi Pro	1 GHz ARMv7 Dual Core	1 GB DDR3	432 MHz	Gigabit	Yes	2	Yes	$45.00

How to Upgrade Minibian for Raspberry Pi 3

Download the existing customized Minibian image from here or the original Minibian from here (original Minibian now supports the Pi 3 but without WiFi).

Using any device that boots Minibian, SSH in and update your repositories

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Now make sure the distro is fully up to date

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then download the latest Raspberry Pi firmware that works with the Pi 3

rpi-update

After it is complete, reboot your Pi device, keep the SD card in the same Pi 2

sudo reboot

SSH in again and delete these two files to prevent eth0 from becoming eth1 on other Pi devices.

This is a result of the firmware update and must be repeated each time you rpi-update if you want to be able to use the image on other Pi devices

sudo rm /lib/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules
sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Now you can shutdown the Pi device and test the SD card by popping it in your Raspberry Pi 3

If you want the Raspberry Pi 3 WiFi to work on Minibian then download this brcm.zip and unpack the brcm folder to /lib/firmware so the path for the brcm drivers becomes /lib/firmware/brcm

Then all you have to do remodprobe to disable and re-enable the Broadcom wireless module

sudo modprobe -r brcmfmac
sudo modprobe brcmfmac

You will be able to see using iwconfig that the wireless is available

iwconfig

Here is a sample output

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:off/any
 Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated
 Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
 Encryption key:off
 Power Management:on

If this works on the Raspberry Pi Zero, Model A or others please let me know in the comments.

Raspberry Pi 3 Minibian Image

Use raspi-config to expand the SD card and use an SSH client to enter the password if you are using a non-US keyboard.