Michael Stapelberg’s Debian Blog

Debian buster on the Raspberry Pi 3 (update) (2018-01-08)

I previously wrote about my Debian buster preview image for the Raspberry Pi 3.

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

• WiFi works out of the box. Use e.g. ip link set dev wlan0 up, and iwlist wlan0 scan.
• Kernel boot messages are now displayed on an attached monitor (if any), not just on the serial console.
• Root file system resizing will now not touch the partition table if the user modified it.
• The image is now compressed using xz, reducing its size to 170M.

As before, the image is built with vmdb2, the successor to vmdebootstrap. The input files are available at https://github.com/Debian/raspi3-image-spec.

Note that Bluetooth is still untested (see wiki:RaspberryPi3 for details).

Given that Bluetooth is the only known issue, I’d like to work towards getting this image built and provided on official Debian infrastructure. If you know how to make this happen, please send me an email. Thanks!

As a preview version (i.e. unofficial, unsupported, etc.) until that’s done, I built and uploaded the resulting image. Find it at https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/raspberrypi3/2018-01-08/. 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/raspberrypi3/2018-01-08/2018-01-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.xz
$ xzcat 2018-01-08-raspberry-pi-3-buster-PREVIEW.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=64k oflag=dsync status=progress

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”