Managing Raspberry Pi images

Creating SD cards

There is a Windows program that some people use but I only use the Raspberry Pi imager, or sometimes Balena Etcher.

Copy IMG

Mick warns that pi-shrink is unreliable. Here it is all the same.

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-BackUp-and-Shrink-Your-Raspberry-Pi-Image/

I did this on Bellman and worked there I think. I think. Did I make notes?

sudo apt install dcfldd gparted

Building new images

pi-gen is what the Raspberry Pi folk use. See /boot/issue.txt on a standard image. For example,

Raspberry Pi reference 2023-12-11
Generated using pi-gen, https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen, 2acf7afcba7d11500313a7b93bb55a2aae20b2d6, stage2

Loading an SD card

Thing is, I could use Bellman but that does not help Mick since it's 800 miles away from him. So I am working with pi5 instead since he has access to his own inventory of Pi hardware.

I put the experimental svxlink image into a SanDisk card reader and popped it into a USB slot on pi5. The builtin card reader shows up in /dev/mmcblk0. SD cards are fine but not roomy enough for what I am about, and slow anyway. For pi5, I put the image on an NVME drive so I'd have enough space to work on images. It won't do to build 8GB images on an 8GB card for example. After booting it looks like this.

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 476.94 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Disk model: RTL9210B-CG
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xdcf0eea7

Device     Boot   Start        End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1          8192    1056767   1048576   512M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2       1056768 1000215215 999158448 476.4G 83 Linux

The SD card in the card reader shows up in /dev/sda.

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 28.82 GiB, 30941380608 bytes, 60432384 sectors
Disk model: SDDR-B531 Reader
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x570b8731

Device     Boot  Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1         8192   532479   524288  256M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb2       532480 60432383 59899904 28.6G 83 Linux

Now I need tools. I need pi-gen and that needs Docker.

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
mkdir Documents
cd Documents
sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/RPI-Distro/pi-gen.git