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Michael Stapelberg

Debian stretch on the Raspberry Pi 3 (update) (2017)

published 2017-10-08, last modified 2019-02-04
in tag debian
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I previously wrote about my Debian stretch preview image for the Raspberry Pi 3.

Now, I’m publishing an updated version, containing the following changes:

  • SSH host keys are generated on first boot.
  • Old kernel versions are now removed from /boot/firmware when purged.
  • The image is built with vmdb2, the successor to vmdebootstrap. The input files are available at https://github.com/Debian/raspi3-image-spec.
  • The image uses the linux-image-arm64 4.13.4-3 kernel, which provides HDMI output.
  • The image is now compressed using bzip2, reducing its size to 220M.

A couple of issues remain, notably the lack of WiFi and bluetooth support (see wiki:RaspberryPi3 for details. Any help with fixing these issues is very welcome!

As a preview version (i.e. unofficial, unsupported, etc.) until all the necessary bits and pieces are in place to build images in a proper place in Debian, I built and uploaded the resulting image. Find it at https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/raspberrypi3/2017-10-08/. To install the image, insert the SD card into your computer (I’m assuming it’s available as /dev/sdb) and copy the image onto it:

$ wget https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/raspberrypi3/2017-10-08/2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.bz2
$ bunzip2 2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.bz2
$ sudo dd if=2017-10-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img of=/dev/sdb bs=5M

If resolving client-supplied DHCP hostnames works in your network, you should be able to log into the Raspberry Pi 3 using SSH after booting it:

$ ssh root@rpi3
# Password is “raspberry”

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