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Jeff Schaller
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Writing openSUSE image to SD card

I am relatively new to Linux and I have assembled a raspberry PI 2 model B and I'm relatively inexperienced with Linux. I have tinkered in the past with SUSE and want to start doing it again. I have managed to get it up and going using the Ubuntu-Mate installation from raspberrypi.org; in fact, I'm typing this from it as I am writing this. My question is about getting openSUSE going, since it is my preference.

The source I am trying to use is the 13.1 version from this link: https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi

The instructions for writing the image specify:

xzcat [image].raw.xz | dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdX; sync

which is all very new to me. Per the directions, I checked lsblk to find out the name of the SD card I wish to write to. I should also mention that since the raspberrypi only has one microSD slot, I am using a generic USB to microSD reader along with a class 2 8gig microsd. Now, I know this is a slow card and if this openSUSE version works well, I have a 32gig class 10 microSD I will write to.

I opened the only terminal in Ubuntu-mate using ctrl-alt-t and jumped to my downloads directory using cd ~/Downloads since this is where i have saved the downloaded image, called openSUSE-13.1-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi.armv7l-1.12.1-Build38.15.raw.xz. Additionally, after downloading it, I shortened the name to help ensure everything is typed correctly.

I then entered this in the terminal window:

sudo xzcat openSUSE.raw.xz | dd bs=4M of=/dev/sda; sync

and I received this error:

dd: failed to open ‘/dev/sda’: Permission denied

I also tried pointing to sda1 and received the same error message. If I check lsblk, the terminal outputs this:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT

sda           8:0    1  7.4G  0 disk 

└─sda1        8:1    1  7.4G  0 part /media/joseph/SUSE

The last item I should mention is that the microSD has been formatted to FAT32 using my Windows box and only has 1 partition as seen above. I gave it the volume name suse for simplification. As of now, I am stuck and really wish to get this working. What am I missing or doing wrong?