snork.ca: Snork's SBC Devuan Images

Snork's SBC Devuan Images 2021-04-17

So, in case you didn't know, I like Devuan. It is a fork of Debian that specifically does not use systemd. At some point I started paying attention to the Devuan related IRC channels on Freenode and the #devuan-arm channel was one of them. With a little renewed interest in Single Board Computers I figured I should get out my old Pi's and put Devuan on them. Turned out, there were no Beowulf [the current release] images... so I made a couple.

Mooning.

I basically installed the previous version, updated it, and cleaned up a few packages. Here are the notes I took as I did the Banana Pi (and the Raspberry Pi was pretty much the same):

@Desktop PC
- Download https://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/embedded/devuan_ascii_2.0.0_armhf_sunxi.img.xz
- Download https://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/embedded/u-boot/Bananapi_defconfig.bin

$ xzcat devuan_ascii_2.0.0_armhf_sunxi.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
$ sudo dd if=Bananapi_defconfig.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 seek=8 && sync

@Banana Pi

# echo "PS1='\[\e[31m\]\u\[\e[37m\]@\[\e[32m\]\h\[\e[m\]:\[\e[35m\]\w\[\e[m\]\$ '" >> ~/.profile
# useradd -m -p $(openssl passwd -crypt devuan) -s /bin/bash devuan

# apt-get purge libglib2.0-0 sgml-base shared-mime-info xdg-user-dirs xml-core
# apt-get purge git git-core git-man lynx lynx-common
# apt-get autoremove --purge

# mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.ascii

# echo "deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf          main" > /etc/apt/sources.list
# echo "deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-updates  main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# echo "deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-security main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# apt-get dist-upgrade
# apt-get purge adwaita-icon-theme exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light gsettings-desktop-schemas gtk-update-icon-cache \
          hicolor-icon-theme mariadb-common mysql-common policykit-1 policykit-1-gnome x11-common
# apt-get autoremove --purge
# apt-get install haveged
# reboot

# rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
# rm /var/log/*.gz
# apt-get clean
# rm ~/.bash_history
# shutdown -h now

@Desktop PC

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1891 of=devuan_beowulf_3.1.1_bpi-m1.img
$ xz -k devuan_beowulf_3.1.1_bpi-m1.img

Important Notes:

- The root password is toor
- The ASCII image does not have a user named devuan, so I simply added it with the default password of devuan
- The first thing you should do when you boot it is CHANGE BOTH OF THESE PASSWORDS
- Deleting "/etc/ssh/ssh_host_*" will force generation of fresh host keys on first boot

If you want to, you could of course do the same [or a similar] thing, or if you trust that I have not done anything terrible to these images [and I have not] you can just use them and save yourself some time. To use them you can download the image you want below and use a command like this to write it to your SD card:

The xz compressed image

$ xzcat devuan_beowulf_3.1.1_bpi-m1.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

The uncompressed image

$ sudo dd if=devuan_beowulf_3.1.1_bpi-m1.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

Downloads

Now when you have it running you'll want to change the passwords like I said before, setup key based auth for SSH, and then maybe resize your root partition since you probably have an SD card bigger than 2GB. If you want to run your BPI off a SATA drive this old post might help.