Talk:Raspberry Pi

2025-08-26T15:54:55Z

Enkore: /* "Note: Raspberry Pi Imager will create ... you may want to grow that partition afterwards" */ new section

== Known Bugs ==
Added a warning since I wasted more than an hour trying to boot.
-- [[User:Lucid|Lucid]] Thu, 11 Feb 2021 15:01:24 -0500

== Entropy ==

Added a troubleshooting section since I ran into a few issues that weren't immediately obvious. I'll update the section a bit more later but for the entropy issue I haven't yet found a good solution (appropriate package? haveged with runlevel default didn't help) so put in the best short term fix I could find for now.

It might be a good idea to add a note about tmpfs being ram-limited. On a 3A+ only ~200M is available for / on a basic installation which severely limits the amount of packages that can be installed.

== Persistence ==
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to partition the SD-Card accordingly? That way, you could have FS > 2GB, too. --[[User:Kurushiyama|Kurushiyama]] ([[User talk:Kurushiyama|talk]]) 10:53, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

I have read that using a journalling fs is not a good idea for SD cards as it shortens their life by multiplying the read/writes. Wouldn't ext2 thus be a better fs for persistent overlays? -- [[User:Nevarmaor|Nevarmaor]] ([[User talk:Nevarmaor|talk]]) 21:56, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Having burned holes in far too many SD Cards I'm writing up some notes to setup a persistent storage running off of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS F2FS]. I think that should be the default.
-- [[User:Lucid|Lucid]] Thu, 11 Feb 2021 15:01:24 -0500

== Installing Alpine- Linux on raspberry pi zero w (udhcpc fail problem) ==

The existing tutorial for raspberry pi is followed except on the reboot, the udhcpc attempts to connect and fails. I managed to fix this problem by editing the /etc/network/interfaces file and add the line:

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf #<--This is the line added to pre-start the wpa_supplicant daemon and log on correctly.

I learned this with the help of the tutorial by Jack Wallen: How to Configure Wireless... on linux.com website

== Which version should I use? ==

There are now three versions of Alpine to choose from (armv7, armhf, aarch64), it might be useful to have a table indicating which version is supported on which hardware. (I'm already unclear on why armv7 and armhf, I assume both are 32 bits and armv7 has soft-float-point instead of hard-float-point, but don't all RPi devices have hard-float-point capabilities? It would be useful to have a little text about this.)

As I understand aarch64 only applies to BCM2837 and above chips (ARMv8 and above), which means it can only run on RPi 3 and above (but I believe RPi 3 and above should be able to use the other images since they also support the 32 bits mode).

Conversely I assume armhf should be usable on all RPi.

== New Install on RPi Zero W ==

I finally got my Pi Zero W installation done and encountered during setup and subsequent boots very sketchy network performance in the form of very high packet loss. I overcame this by switching from static IP address (which seemed to break networking scripts) to dhcp by editing the /etc/network/interfaces file. I also edited the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file using vi to delete duplicated entries which accumulated while trying to get a decent network connection via wireless.

I then went on to try to install the software which is the purpose of using Alpine for me, mosquitto. This had me stumped as I am using armhf, V3.12, have the 3.12 main, community, edge main and community and testing repos and can see mosquito and mosquito-clients packages in the repository listing but consistently get errors on install. I tried to resolve dependencies by hand via installation on required packages with the result I can install some but not all of these packages. I can install other software such as sshd and nmap but get an almost meaningless to me error about unsatisfiable contraints, mosquito (missing), which I am guessing means it is not really in the repo or the entry in the repo does not work.

This is an added comment about overlooking the obvious - I was mispelling mosquitto (yes, I was trying to install something I typed as mosquito, missing one 't'). It worked much better with the correct spelling and now I can take back most of those things I was saying about the maintainer of the repo.

I notice no activity on these wiki pages for over a year. Anybody actually use this section of the Wiki?

== Proposal: Consolidating Disk Installation Materials ==
It looks like the material on disk-based installation is currently spread between this page and another dedicated page [[Classic install or sys mode on Raspberry Pi|sys-mode install page]]. I would like to propose merging it with the sys-install instructions, so there's only one copy. That will lower the maintenance burden when the procedure changes. --[[User:Etothepii|Etothepii]] June 27, 2021.

== OTG mode on Pi CM4 ==
On Pi Compute Module 4 with I/O board, it seems to be necessary to set: <code>otg_mode=1</code>. This is due to the way it's wired as far as I can tell and the setting is present in stock Raspberry PI OS config file. I've updated the preparation section accordingly.

== Moving content around ==

The way content was sorted on the page was not ideal. First there's preparation steps, followed by installation steps. But along with the first installation steps, there's an explanation that this process will install Alpine in diskless mode and the implications of this. It's not ideal to explain what we're doing halfway through the process.

I've moved this explanation to the top, so that people can understand what they're doing and decide the right process before going through half the steps. Hopefully, this'll result in content in this page being in a more intuitive order.

Please let me know if you have any comments on this. [[User:WhyNotHugo|WhyNotHugo]] ([[User talk:WhyNotHugo|talk]]) 14:09, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

== "Note: Raspberry Pi Imager will create ... you may want to grow that partition afterwards" ==

<blockquote>
> Raspberry Pi Imager will create a minimum-sized FAT32 partition with only about 8MB of free space. If you need a bigger partition (i.e. with more available room for diskless packages cache and config files), you may want to grow that partition afterwards.
</blockquote>

It's worth pointing out that rpi-imager creates neither a partition nor can you grow it afterwards.

rpi-imager creates this:

<pre>
$ parted -l
Model: Generic STORAGE DEVICE (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 3965MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0.00B 3965MB 3965MB fat16
</pre>

You can't create a second partition or grow this partition, as it is not a partition. It should be possible to grow the filesystem on the device, but fatresize refuses to do so, as it tries to fix the non-existing partition table:

<pre>
$ sudo fatresize -s 1G -f /dev/sdb1
fatresize 1.1.0 (20250116)
part(start=0, end=7744511, length=7744512)
No Implementation: GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it!
$ sudo fatresize -s 1G -f /dev/sdb
fatresize 1.1.0 (20250116)
part(start=0, end=7744511, length=7744512)
No Implementation: GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it!
</pre>

So with current versions of rpi-imager at least you really actually can't install Alpine Linux. --[[User:Enkore|Enkore]] ([[User talk:Enkore|talk]]) 15:54, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

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Talk:Raspberry Pi