Title: Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images
-Tags: english, freedombox, mesh network
+Tags: english, debian, freedombox, mesh network
Date: 2013-10-27 17:00
<p>The
debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
-of a plan to simplify the build system for the FreedomBox project.
-The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for the virtualbox
-images, but its home made multistrap based system for Dreamplug
-images, and it is lacking support for Raspberry Pi.</p>
+of a plan to simplify the build system for
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
+project</a>. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
+the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
+based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
+Raspberry Pi.</p>
<p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
-<a href=http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html"">Debian
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>. First, the
<tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
-vmdebootstrap to create armel images on a amd64 host. Next I added
+vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
<tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
-upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and am now
+upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
available from
<a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
upstream project page</a>.</p>
set -e # Exit on first error
rootdir="$1"
cd "$rootdir"
-cat <<EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
+cat <<EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
EOF
# Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
<p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
-/etc/hosts with the minbase variant.</p>
+/etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
+set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
+that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
+using a non-free binary blob.</p>
<p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff