How can I burn a Raspberry Pi image to SD card from Ubuntu?

Question

I'm sure this must be fairly simple but can't find it here.

How does one go from having a blank SD card to having an SD card that boots a Raspi?

Answer 1

Easy Install & Resize the SD Card on the Raspberry Pi on Ubuntu.

1. First, open a terminal and install the ImageWriter and GParted utilities with apt-get:

   sudo apt-get install usb-imagewriter gparted
   

2. Assuming you are starting with a fresh install, download the newest release from the Raspberry Pi download site.

3. Extract the downloaded archive, and then open ImageWriter by typping in a console:

   sudo imagewriter
   

4. Select the desired .img file and target device, in this case, debian6-19-04-2012.img, and /dev/mmcblk0

   

5. Once the image write has completed, the next task is to repartition the SD card. Note: this process can be done at any later as well, it is not limited to only during initial setup!

If you're interested on resizing your SD CARD, check the source of this answer

Source

Answer 2

You can do it from the command line as well. No need to install anything.

1. Find the name of the device of the plugged in SD-card. For instance I typed ls -la /dev/sd* before and after plugging in the sd-card. I saw the date of /dev/sdc change and thus decided that that was the one.

2. Find the place of the unzipped image, which was /home/username/Downloads/2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img for me.

Type the following (mutatis mutandis):

sudo dd if=/home/username/Downloads/2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdc

and wait for the command to return. It may be quite a while, especially over usb2.

Resizing can be done from the Pi itself in the raspi-config program that starts automatically the first time you boot.