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Raspberry Pi Pre Init

Purpose

A program which lets you set up a Raspberry Pi solely by writing to the /boot partition (i.e. the one you can write from most computers!).

This allows you to distribute a small .zip file to set up a Raspberry Pi to do anything. You tell the user to unzip it over the top of the Pi's boot partition - the system can set itself up perfectly on the first boot.

This package contains a single run-once.sh script that can be used to do all the setup needed. Alternatively, you can create a run-once.d and/or a on-boot.d directory and put multiple scripts in either/each. These folders will be created for you after the first boot and can be used at any time.

Trying it out

  • Download and write a standard Raspbian SD card, e.g. the Raspbian Stretch Lite.
  • Copy the content of this project's boot folder to the microSD card's /boot partition.
  • Rename either cmdline.txt.stretch or cmdline.txt.jessie to cmdline.txt.orig (this selection will be automatic in a later update)
  • Remove the SD card and put it into your Pi.

The Raspberry Pi should now boot several times. The first boot takes 2-5 minutes depending on your network, and which model of Raspberry Pi you use (I tested with model 3).

By default only a single simple change will be applied. A /home/pi/.bash_aliases file will be created with alias ll='ls -la in it. The boot/run-once.sh script includes several commented blocks to demonstrate how to accomplish common tasks.

Building pi-init2

You will need golang installed (I'm currently using 1.7) sudo apt install golang. Go will need to install required packages. I have tried to make this as easy as calling make reqs.

There is a Makefile in the root of this project. Calling make will compile the Go source code and create boot/pi-init2 if it doesn't exist. (Use make clean all to replace it.)

How it works

This is really cool. The cmdline.txt specifies an init=/pi-init2 kernel argument to use a custom binary in this package in place of the usual systemd init. That binary holds everything except for the cmdline.txt file (that would be a chicken-egg problem) and the run-once.sh which you will modify to script your desired setup.

How/Why you should incorporate this project into your Raspberry Pi project

If you have a project you expect someone to run on an RPi (especially if it would be the RPi's single purpose) you could provide your own run-once.sh script that will clone your project, configure, and install it.

Disclaimer/Credits

This has been tested with this (what I believe to be the latest release) version of Jessie but the instructions above assume Stretch.

Credits go to the following projects:

  • pi-init2: This is the fork of this project that I chose to base my fork off of.
  • raspbian-boot-setup: My first project attempting to accomplish the same goal.
  • PiBakery: A good resource to find more blocks to setup your Raspberry Pi.

Any contributions appreciated!