Re: RPi customization utility [Re: More progress to report [Re: Debian Bullseye on Raspberry Pi 4 4GB?]]

["Rick Thomas" <rick.thomas@pobox.com>]

Thanks Andy and Alan, for the clarification.

This is an experimental system, so I felt there was no long-term harm (it being a short-term installation, anyway) in installing rapsi-config from the raspian archives just to see what it looked like and explore what it could do.  Having verified that it really doesn't do anything I can't do just as easily manually (all the things Andy listed and a few more) I will probably take the manual approach in the future.

Enjoy!

Rick

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021, at 3:49 AM, Alan Corey wrote:

Right, I wasn't exactly recommending running raspi-config on a non-raspian system but looking at how it does things and doing them manually.  One of the things I dislike about Debian (I haven't looked at others) is that there's an ever-increasing hodgepodge of specialized little scripts.  If you've been using it awhile you're probably not in the habit of re-reading documentation to see if somebody changed how you're officially supposed to do something.

But raspi-config is a place to look up things like how to boot to a command line, or how to configure locales or change your keyboard layout.  And it's maintained, unlike some ancient documentation that should be banished but is still out there.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 6:17 AM Andrew M.A. Cater <amacater@einval.com> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 02:16:29AM -0800, Rick Thomas wrote:

>

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021, at 10:10 PM, Alan Corey wrote:

> > There are scripts for those, keyboard and language too.  Also WiFi country, I forget what else.  Locales is in there.

> >

> > Take a look at a recent raspi-config.  I think Odroid, maybe the Pine64 bunch has a generic-ized version of that.  Armbian probably does too.  Raspi-config is just a Bash script that uses Whiptail for its menus.  Parts of it are useful on other things.  It's on Github somewhere.

> >

> >

> > On Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 11:09 PM Rick Thomas <rick.thomas@pobox.com> wrote:

> >> 

>

> Thanks! Alan...

>

> So, here's what I found...

>

> Immediately after the first boot of the SD card, as root, do the following:

>

> #Get the raspi-config utility:

>     wget https://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/pool/main/r/raspi-config/raspi-config_20200601_all.deb -P /tmp

> #Install packages it needs:

>     apt-get install libnewt0.52 whiptail parted triggerhappy lua5.1 alsa-utils -y

>     sudo apt-get install -fy

> #Install the utility itself:

>     dpkg -i /tmp/raspi-config_20200601_all.deb

> #And run it

>     raspi-config

>

> It will give you a bunch of customizations you might want to do.  I can personally vouch that you'll need to at least do options (1) change the root password and set up a non-root user,  (2) Configure the network, and (4) set localizations (timezone, keyboard, locale, and a few others).

>

> The 20200601 version happens to be the latest as of this writing.  But just to be sure, you can use the tool itself (option 8) to check for and install any updated version.

> Easy!

>

> Rick

And whoosh - you've created a FrankenDebian and dependencies on a Raspberry

Pi OS that you don't run.. Raspi-config is a collection of

shell scripts. Gunnar's Raspberry Pi images are deliberately small.

If you want to reconfigure locale -

apt-get install locales ; dpkg-reconfigure locales

(this last as root / root equivalent using sudo)

Timezone: dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

There are good Debian commands that will work on every Debian system you

come across :-)

All the very best, as ever,

Andy C.