Running "standard" Linux distribution on BTT's Pi3 clone

[ChrisA]

I oreded a Formbot V0.2 kit. Shipping was 14 hours, even faster than "next day". It helps that I live 30 miles from the warehouse. But I don't yet have any printed parts, those will take at least another week to arrive. So I am playing with the electronics. I unpacked the BTT Pi3 clone and I have it running on my desk right now. It is able to display Mainsail's main screen. But nothing is configured or works because it is just a bare board with no printer. As I type, it is updating itself with all the latest Debian updates.

QUESTION: Can I install UIbuntu on this?

What I am afraid of is that BTT wrote some custom kernel drivers for the chips on this board and I'll be stuck with Debian "Bullseye" literally forever. (And "bookworm" is already out.)

It is actually a very good computer for it's purpose. It seems to be able to run directly off 24 volts and have BTT's USB2CAN built in as well as some 5-volt neopixel and SPI is broken out to a custom JST connector, I don't have to pull it off the GPIO headers.

I likely can figure out how to build a custom kernel and update this thing but I use Ubuntu on all my robotics projects and standardizing makes things easy.

So has anyone run any Linux distribution other than the image on the BTT GitHub?

 

[majic79]

Really good question - I've got 2 BTT Pi's and I'm looking at upgrading one of them to see if I can get it to upgrade to Debian Bookworm. I'm a debian user, so I'm happy to stay in that ecosystem. It might be possible to load ubuntu onto it via some Apt tricks? I found a linuxquestions thread from 2007 that says that's a bad idea, but things have moved on in the past 17 years, so maybe that has changed. I wouldn't want to try on a production system, but maybe something to test on a sacrificial board. I think as long as the uboot side is good, the rest should be possible

 

[ChrisA]

Really good question - I've got 2 BTT Pi's and I'm looking at upgrading one of them to see if I can get it to upgrade to Debian Bookworm. I'm a debian user, so I'm happy to stay in that ecosystem. It might be possible to load ubuntu onto it via some Apt tricks? I found a linuxquestions thread from 2007 that says that's a bad idea, but things have moved on in the past 17 years, so maybe that has changed. I wouldn't want to try on a production system, but maybe something to test on a sacrificial board. I think as long as the uboot side is good, the rest should be possible

I have "bookworm" running on my BTT Pi now. The upgrade is nothing special, just change the "sources". The Pi3 is so darn slow that it take a few hours but it works. Klipper, Mailsail, Fluid, Moonraker and Octopi are all running on Bookwork but there is no printer and no thermisters connected so Klipper halts because "the temperature out of range. The electronic is just on my desk, the V0.2 printer kit is still in the box.

So the software is 100% upgradable. Next I'm trying to figure out how the login banner that prints "BTT-CB1 in big letters works so I can remove it. I think /etc/defaults, but I've not started looking yet.

 

[majic79]

How to Set a Custom SSH Warning Banner and MOTD in Linux

SSH banner warnings are necessary when companies or organizations want to display a stern warning to discourage unauthorized parties from accessing a server.

www.tecmint.com

It's an SSH message of the day (motd) setting is my guess

 

[ChrisA]

How to Set a Custom SSH Warning Banner and MOTD in Linux

SSH banner warnings are necessary when companies or organizations want to display a stern warning to discourage unauthorized parties from accessing a server.

www.tecmint.com

It's an SSH message of the day (motd) setting is my guess

The method described in the linked article is not the method BTT is using to display the ASCII-artwork banner. They left it set to the default "None"

I found it last night. In the old days, early 1980s or so, the "motd" was a text file always stored at /etc/motd. At login, this file was simply copied to the terminal before the login prompt was displayed. Simple. But today we want "dynamic" text that shows things like the number of logged-in users and the CPU core temperature so it can't be a static text file. We also care about security and don't want to give out any information in some cases while it is OK in others based on some configurable rules. So it seems to have gotten far more complex sence last I looked at this 20 years ago. There is a file where you can enable or disable parts of the motd, The part to take out is called "header".

So, finally go to /etc/default/system-motd and read the comments. Then add "header" to the string assigned to MOTD_DISABLE so that it reads
MOTD_DISABLE="header". You can disable other stuff too if you like, see comments in the file.

Next I might get around to making my own header that shows in big letters something about which printer you are logging into