How to trim disk images to partition size

I’ve recently been playing with my Raspberry Pi and Arch Linux when I encountered the following problem:

I’ve downloaded the Arch Linux image from the Raspberry Pi download page and used dd to copy it to a 8GB SD card.

How to compile Truecrypt from source

A few days ago my new USB hard drive arrived. My idea was to connect the hard drive to my Raspberry Pi so that everyone in the network can read the data on that drive. But all the data stored on that drive should be encrypted. The problem was that I also wanted to use the hard drive to copy files from a computer of a friend. Not everyone uses Linux, so I could not encrypt the hard drive with LUKS.
But I had an idea to encrypt the hard drive with Truecrypt, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I created a little partition (about 100MB) which is not encrypted and download the Truecrypt installer for each OS to that partition. The advantage is that you don’t need an internet connection to download the installer. The rest of the hard drive is encrypted with Truecrypt.

The main problem was the installation of Truecrypt on my Pi because there is no ARM binary. I’ve no X-Server on my Pi so I had to install Truecrypt as console-only version. Here are the steps I’ve done to install Truecrypt on my Pi.

How to install Slackware ARM on a Raspberry Pi

A few days ago I got my Raspberry Pi and I had to decide which OS I install. I like Slackware and decided to give Slackware ARM (formerly ArmedSlack) a try. It was surprisingly easy to install it.
The first step was to download the Slackware ARM installer and copy it to the SD card.
Download installer:

$ wget http://www.daves-collective.co.uk/raspi/images/raspi-slack-installer_01Aug12.img.xz

Write the installer to SD card:

$ xz -dc raspi-slack-installer_01Aug12.img.xz | dd of=[device] bs=65536