Talk:Raspberry Pi

Known Bugs

Added a warning since I wasted more than an hour trying to boot. -- 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. --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? -- 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 F2FS. I think that should be the default. -- 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 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.