Raspberry Pi OS • Re: Installing Raspbian on 10 Rpi-5

So, on the setup of the first RPi, after the first boot, I perform sudo apt update and upgrade...it downloads almost 2.5Gb of updates - that is after using the latest distro image file from the rapi downloads.

How can I add those updates to my sdm (or any another method) image so as to avoid that download on subsequent setup and install of Rpi.

sdm is intended to do all that stuff for you, rather than you having at one IMG manually and subsequently copying it to others. Although you can use it for that as well, it's not highly recommended.

Since you've done it all manually once, you now have a recipe of what you want to do to configure/customize your specific IMG.

Now you can edit up an sdm pluglist to do those exact steps. After running that, you can then burn that one single IMG to 10 or 100 SSD/SD Cards for your Pi fleet and you're off and running.

Here's an example of an sdm pluglist:...and you can start with this example script that you can modify as you wish to customize your IMGs.

I personally think that one of the key features of sdm is that when the next release of Debian is released (Trixie) you can go through those exact steps again to build fresh Trixie disks for you fleet. It will save you literally a TON of time.

Have any specific sdm questions? Ask them on the sdm github, the maintainer is quite responsive there

One last thing: You might find it VERY handy to install apt-cacher-ng on either a Raspberry Pi or other Debian-based system you're running. After the apt-cacher-ng cache has been filled, subsequent systems downloading packages will get them from the cache.

Once the cache is loaded it will reduce a really long download to just a few seconds, since it all comes over the LAN. It also helps a lot if you plan to keep your Pi fleet updated with the latest fixes and enhancements.

See sdm-apt-cacher for a simple apt-cacher-ng setup script.

Statistics: Posted by bls — Fri Sep 13, 2024 11:29 pm

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