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I was wondering if anyone in this community has used Etcher to burn OS images to a Raspberry Pi. I have a Rapberry Pi 1 Model A and would like to use Etcher to burn Raspbian Stretch Lite to it with some custom modifications:

  • I want to start with Raspbian Stretch Lite as the base image
  • Then I have several *nix packages that I'd like to add to that image using something like apt-get
  • Then I want to install my own app/service at a particular location on the file system
  • Finally I want the whole OS configuration/image to be burned onto the pi so that when I power it on, Raspbian starts running and its just like I had manually provisioned the server myself

Can Etcher accomplish all this for me? Or do I need to load the Raspbian image into a different tool and customize it (run apt-get, manually install my app, etc.) from there? What would that tool pipeline look like? Thanks in advance!

smeeb
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2 Answers2

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This isn't possible to do with Etcher and instead one needs to use a combination of chroot and qemu tooling.

smeeb
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Etcher or any other imaging tool can't do it out-of-the-box, but you can easily create a small microSD card running raspbian stretch lite, boot it up and customize the configuration (e.g. apt-get packages), then create the image of that card as your base image and burn that to new cards.

If you resize the / partition on the card to be just large enough to hold the required files, it will reduce the image size. I do this for all my installs to save time with things like localization, installing defaults, configuring editors, etc.

If using a linux system (including a RPi) to burn your base image, it is possible to mount the partitions on the new card after burning the image, and doing some tweaking there (e.g. editing hostname), but things like properly installing packages require a running system.

bobstro
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