Raspberry Pi: how to create your own image


I am currently developing a custom Roaming VoIP PBX as a Raspberry Pi image, which requires frequent rebuilding of project packages. Compiling packages directly on the Raspberry Pi is not ideal as it can take several hours. Therefore, I was looking for a tool to create the base image on a more powerful machine, such as my laptop or a VPS.

A good starting point is this blog post on building your own Raspberry Pi image. It includes a shell script for building the image (right-click and select ‘download as’).

Here are some useful links regarding cross-compilation and QEMU (for emulating and compiling in a Raspberry Pi environment):

Update (May 2013)

Sometime ago, I created a repository with helper scripts: https://github.com/andrius/build-raspbian-image. Feel free to check it out!