On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 05:29:25PM +0100, Adrien Ferré wrote:

Just tried a linaro nano distrib for beagleboards. I used the dd tool to copy bit per bit the system to the sdcard but I now have a 500 Mb system on a 8 Gb sd card. First thing to do is to resize the rootfs partition.

I guess one answer is if you don't want a fixed image size, it's probably going to be best to use linaro-media-create, which lets you decide exactly what you want.