tarxvftech / pim17

It's like Pi-Star, but smaller and leaner and heavily focused on M17.

piM17

A maximally-standard and familiar Alpine-based Linux distribution for M17, MMDVM, and SDR purposes. The goal is to make something enduring that can be maintained with less effort.

Building on Alpine Edge for now. Hoping to switch to a long term release later.

You could call this in development. It may be useful to you even now. The current audience is people with enough Linux experience to be comfortable on the command line. The intended eventual audience may be anyone with a hotspot or repeater, but we're a long way from there.

Forks of piM17 are expected and encouraged. piM17 is intended to be a solid base of tools and sane configuration to build the right thing.

TODO

• show how to start, restart services (the service files already exist!)
• add cronjob and instructions for m17hostsupdate
• easy way (tailscale?) to allow remote troubleshooting with a single command ideally

Values

Standardization, common tooling, up to date software.

System packages >>> installing from source.

Minimal hacks.

Eminently hackable.

If you do use this distribution:

Please file issues with any issues you encounter, including with documentation.

Insufficient or incorrect documentation is a bug.

If you find an Alpine documentation page that is helpful, please link to it in the pim17 docs.

If you get stuck, say something.

Warnings

By default the filesystems are quite small. This keeps the downloaded images a bit smaller (so as packages get added they may get larger).

You can easily expand the filesystem up to the partition size with resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2. p2 is the / ("root") partition. You can do this live while using the filesystem (Mentioned only because you may have encountered other resizing options in the past where that was not supported).

You can see partition sizes with fdisk -l or lsblk.

You can see partition free space with df -h.

The /data partition should be the correct and full size already, IIRC. Doing this for / can be automated but it's not a priority for me at the moment. Pull requests encouraged!

on systems that aren't raspberry pis

You can use almost all the included tools on standard Alpine (docs TODO). See the repo files in input/etc/apk/ for details for now.

Built with

https://github.com/raspi-alpine/builder

more specifically, built with my fork of it:

https://github.com/tarxvftech/pim17_builder

Developers

You'll need docker. You need to make qemu to register cross-arch support. Everything builds in docker. Makefiles are where to start.

You must git clone the fork pim17_builder to builder/ in this directory. You must have the keys in packaging/ set up right to install the custom packages.

Run make img to run the builder. You'll find the images generated in output/. Use the one for your architecture (armhf for pi0w and pi2, aarch64 for pi3 or better). You can ignore the _update.img.

Installation

Flash the img to your SD card, standard raspberry pi image instructions just like pi-star or raspbian. You'll have to unzip the img first, of course.

You want 'armhf' for the pi0w and anything pi2 or below. You want aarch64 for pi3 and greater.

gunzip pim17_armhf_edge.img.gz
sudo dd if=pim17_armhf_edge.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4096 status=progress

Wait for it to finish. If you'll be using wifi, edit wpa_supplicant_additions.txt on the first partition of the SD card with your wifi credentials in standard wpa_supplicant format. Only DHCP is supported by default, sorry, but it's standard Alpine Linux so it's easy to change if you need to.

I think ethernet is set to DHCP by default but I'd have to check.

Usage

(See also "Warnings" up above).

To log in, ssh root@pim17, password is m17project. Make sure to change that, copy SSH keys over, etc. doas or sudo are your own problem for now but I do intend to add a non-root user with doas support eventually.

To install packages, it's standard alpine linux. See packaging/ for custom packages until they get broken out into their own repos.

You'll have to mount -o remount,rw / to remount the root partition read-write to change settings. /data is rw by default and many things in /etc/ have a symlink to /data. This should make a system reasonably safe against power loss while still allowing easy config file editing and such.

I'd prefer an overlay file system but don't remember why I didn't do that to begin with. Not sure I tried, but we should look into that!

To update the list of packages (do early and often):

apk update

To install a package:

apk add

To upgrade the system ('ware disk space!! And be extra sure / and /boot are mounted rw!):

apk upgrade

Important (nonstandard) packages:

mmdvm_firmware_bin: A limited set of organized, precompiled firmware images for common MMDVM modems.
mmdvm_easyflash: Allows you to 'python -m mmdvm_easyflash' to upgrade firmware on modems supported by mmdvm_firmware_bin.
m17gateway, mmdvmcal, mmdvmhost: Packaged M17/MMDVM binaries and sample configs as necessary. Check /data/etc for the configs. Might only support M17 to start, more to come if there's demand.

Standard openssh

Short form is that dropbear is currently handling ssh and you want to replace it with openssh/sshd. Note that you should edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow root logins yes instead of without-password OR add your SSH keys before continuing, lest you be locked out, requiring manual SD card intervention. apk add openssh rc-update add sshd rc-update del dropbear /etc/init.d/dropbear stop /etc/init.d/sshd start

Docker

Make sure / is resized and currently rw. Or you can do the following: cd /var/lib; ln -s /data/var/lib/docker cd /var/; mkdir /data/var/log; ln -s /data/var/log

To add it: apk add docker docker-compose rc-update add docker /etc/init.d/docker start

docker ps -a to make sure it's working.

RW / by default

Edit /etc/fstab and change the ro to rw for / and /boot. Edit /boot/cmdline.txt and remove the ro (I think). You're done!

unsorted and unedited nonsense below here

TODO

• [] MMDVM package, MMDVM_HS package renamed to account for that.
• [] make hostnames unique - pim17-XXXXXX maybe from last three octets of mac address?
• [] auto calibration of hotspot? with a known-good rtl-sdr, the good ones have excellent clocks

✔ - need gcc,binutils,newlib-arm-none-eabi
 master branch, make dvm
 boot while shorting JP1 (a reboot is not sufficient, all power must be removed)
 make deploy-dvm

• ✔ disable console=serial0,115200 in /uboot/cmdline.txt
• ✔ add dtoverlay=disable-bt in /uboot/config.txt

 lonestar - mmdvm_hs_hat equivalent - for sure? need to test M17 mode first
 stm32-dvm - make dvm 

M17Gateway - hostupdate script needs to have paths set TXInvert required for mmdvmhost

Ideas: automatic HDMI output https://github.com/sqshq/sampler

80% solution: Minimal html page with buttons that can call tiny CGI script to restart services. Web-based file manager/editor for people unwilling to CLI.

• https://github.com/prasathmani/tinyfilemanager probably needs to be edited to whitelist specific files. THat's fine! MMDVM read-only dashboard.
• https://github.com/do6uk/mmdvmdash
• https://github.com/dg9vh/MMDVMHost-Dashboard
• https://github.com/dg9vh/MMDVMHost-Websocketboard

or much better, w0chp's dash: https://repo.w0chp.net/Chipster/W0CHP-PiStar-Dash

Important packages

https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx
* caddy caddy-openrc 
* rtl-sdr librtlsdr-dev
* python3
* pym17
* docker, docker-compose
	make sure space on disk!
	service docker start
	rc-update add docker default
  docker itself doesn't run when /var/ is a read-only filesystem!!!
  * openwebrx on docker - easy!
	docker volume create openwebrx-settings
	docker run --device /dev/bus/usb -p 8073:8073 --name openwebrx -v openwebrx-settings:/var/lib/openwebrx --tmpfs=/tmp/openwebrx jketterl/openwebrx:stable
	docker exec -it confident_lamport python3 /opt/openwebrx/openwebrx.py admin adduser admin

	kinda slow on pi3, probably not worth it by default.
  	add later:
	https://github.com/jketterl/digiham
	https://github.com/jketterl/codecserver

* partition is jsut barely big enough
	make sure to 
	mount -o remount,rw /
	resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
	resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p3
	on first boot

Ideas

• CLI auto-run: https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Run_software_on_tty1_console_instead_of_login_getty.html

Bugs

• ✔ USB Serial cdc_acm device doesn't work (fix: Include all modules)

• ✔ Wifi doesn't start on boot - device isn't ready in time (fix: disable networking init script on boot)

• ✔ Wifi has hardcoded credentials ... (now pulls from /boot on boot!)

• can't emulate, have to flash a real pi https://azeria-labs.com/emulate-raspberry-pi-with-qemu/ qemu-system-arm -M vexpress-a9 -kernel zImage -initrd initramfs-grsec -dtb vexpress-v2p-ca9.dtb -hda hda.img -serial stdio

• ✔ couldn't get dtoverlay disable-bt to boot, appears to be uboot's fault. so i fucking removed all the uboot shit lol!

• lonestar boards didn't take M17 firmware? or what? greencase one has a different firmware so they must not have flashed correctly

• the clear case one definitely took correctly, reflashed with a custom version text which was part of the problem (stock version texts, non-updated version date, etc)

Bugs with builder?

• ✔ builder ab_active and ab_flash don't always work? with no error messages, either
• ✔ ab_active shows currently booted but doesn't tell you what's going to boot next
• couldn't build armhf ... kernel_packages wasnt being set, which was because arch wasn't being read correctly somehow. Suddenly started working and don't know why but related to srcme file and ARCH variable.
• ✔ uboot doesn't work with dtoverlay, removed uboot

https://github.com/mtlynch/picoshare/pull/164/files