Minibian is a smaller footprint of raspian, it’s really clean and you now have the power to decide what you want to install, which is really good for small projects because it starts really fast and doesn’t use a lot of memory.

Adjusting the Locale and Time Zone

The initial locale and time zone is set to UK so you probably want to change this if youre not living in UK.

Change the keyboard locale. Run the following command:

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Change the system local. Run the command

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Edit the /etc/default/locale file and change/add the following lines to your locale I use sv_SE.UTF-8:

LANG=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=sv_SE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=sv_SE.UTF-8

Setup your time zone

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Secure the platform and adding a user

To make your system a little more secure, you can enable sudo and disable the root login. We also want to secure the ssh server because the initial keys are the same for all installations (so anyone can use those keys).

Install sudo:

apt-get install sudo

Create new user.

adduser <user>

Add your new user to the sudoer’s list. Run visudo then add the following line after the root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL line:

<your user> ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Now disable the root user with the command

passwd -l root

It’s a good idea to change the SSH server keys because its easy to impersonate your system because everybody have access to the keys.

sudo rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

Raspberry Pi 3

The strategy from Minibian is to not add anything that is not supported by all, so wifi and bluetooth is not installed, so you need to add these if you want to use BT or Wifi

apt-get update
apt-get install firmware-brcm80211 pi-bluetooth wpasupplicant

Configure Wifi

apt-get install wpasupplicant

Proceed with usual wifi configuration, editing your /etc/network/interfaces like this

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf fitting your wifi network

network={
ssid="yourssid"
psk="yourpassword"
}