New release of the Raspberry Pi 3 *unofficial Debian preview* image
Back in June, Michael Stapelberg asked for somebody interested in adopting the unofficial Debian image for the Raspberry Pi 3 family. It didn’t take me long to raise my hand.
What did take me long is to actually do it. I have adopted Raspberry3 image spec repository, with the recipes to build the image using Lars’ great vmdb2, as well as the raspi3-firmware non-free Debian package.
After delaying this for too long, first in order to understand it better, and second because of the workload I had this last semester, I think we are ready to announce…
There is a new, updated preview image!
You can look at the instructions at the Debian Wiki page on
RaspberryPi3. Or you can just jump to the downloads, at my
people.debian.org — xzipped
image (388MB, unzips to 1.5GB, and resizes to the capacity of your
boot SD at first boot), verification
sha256sum, and PGP-signed
verification sha256sum.
[update (06/2020)] I am leaving the above links as they were, as I am kind of a preservation geek. I have moved the images — Now they are generated on a daily basis. Please go fetch them instead from https://raspi.debian.net/.
There are still many things that can be improved, for sure. The main issues for me are:
- No wireless support. Due to a bug in Linux kenel 4.18, wlan0 support is broken. It is reported, and we expect it to be fixed in the next kernel upload.
- Hardcoded root password. This will be tackled later on — part of the issue is that I cannot ensure how this computer will be booted. I have some ideas to tackle this, though...
Other than that, what we have is a very minimal Debian system, ready for installing software!
At some point in the future, I plan to add build profiles for some common configurations. But lets go a step at a time.
Comments
Anonymous 2018-12-05 05:25:04
architecture
Is this aarch64?
Anonymous 2018-12-06 03:38:24
Thanks. I was recently
Thanks. I was recently looking for a distro for a RPi3 to test some code on aarch64 and could only find a limited set of choices. Nice to know I can use debian next time.
Coucouf 2018-12-04 23:04:24
Hi, thanks for this ! Any
Hi, thanks for this !
Any reason why it wouldn’t work on a raspberry pi 2 ? I guess the image is not arm64 but armhf which should be compatible with version 2.
freeimages 2019-02-11 20:01:00
Great Work
Great Work
gwolf 2018-12-05 07:18:17
You got it right: ARM64
The Raspberry Pi 3 runs on ARM64, so this makes it impossible for the images to run on the Raspberry Pi 2. Again, this is something we might be able to tackle in the future. There is a very large number of 2’s out there. Also, 1 (specially with Zero / Zero W, which I understand are exactly compatible with them). But… Finding whether their firmware works is another can of worms! As I mentioned, I also uploaded an updated version for the 3’s firmware. I haven’t tackled any older firmwares.
gwolf 2018-12-05 07:22:14
ARM64
Yes. AFAICT, in Debian AArch64 is simply called ARM64.
gwolf 2018-12-15 13:19:55
Minimal Debian install, but full distro available
Hi, What I try to do here is to create a minimal working image, with which you can install all of the missing bits and end up with a completely functional full Debian system.
Konstantin 2018-12-06 00:34:01
UserLand
Hey, great work! Does it ship with the user land? Including mmal and vcos?
Thanks!
Greetings