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Raspberry Alma

· 6 min read
Matej Focko

Every now and then I get angry at something not working on the Raspberry and so I decide to swap the OSs. Now it's time for something new and not expected.

fastfetch on the Raspberry

Purpose and past​

After I've subscribed a VPS at vpsfree.cz for myself, I got an opportunity to drop using an old laptop for running a local “server”. At that point all I've had was self-hosted Gitea, some aliases on nginx and that was all. Out with the old laptop and let's begin experimenting with the Raspberry, right?

The first OS that got on the Raspberry was archLinux (BTW…). I've been using it for a long time and had the best experience with. I haven't hit any issues, but at the same time, you need to keep in mind we're running it off the SD card and they are known to get worn out quickly, especially if you write a lot which… guess what, is quite common with rolling and bleeding-edge distribution 😄 And the worst part is keeping up with the updates.

And that's how I migrated to openSUSE Leap :) I've been using openSUSE for at least 4 years during the high school and a bit more before and after… openSUSE is very user-friendly (YaST is amazing) distribution and honestly just works. However the cost lies in Cockpit not being available1 and some weird design decision, e.g., networking stack is very fragile2.

And I've got finished in the recent weeks with some issues during updates, but those can be, of course, blamed on me, cause I don't watch over it as I should :)

I should probably sum up the latest state of what was running before I decided to go for a merciless wipe. So here it is:

  • local Gitea instance, just in case and out of habit
  • Wireguard connection for easy administration
  • Certbot & nginx; nginx is probably the biggest piece of work as it also provides reverse proxy for mikrotik router and Ubiquiti AP provided by ISP
  • CUPS server that has joined the journey once the HP printer was too big of a pain in the 🍑 to handle via USB
  • DDNS service, cause there's public, but dynamic IP from ISP

Choosing the next distro​

I had the switch in mind for some time, but I couldn't decide on the distribution… In the ideal world, I'd just slap CentOS Stream on it, but there's no Raspberry “support” for CentOS3. So the other choices were plain Debian and something else from the RHEL-family which could be either Fedora4, AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux.

I should admit that I'm not a big Debian fan 😄 Even though 12 bookworm is relatively on the same terms as anything that tries to match RHEL9, it still feels weird. That might be caused by the fact that I've switched RPM-based distributions a long time ago (including screwing around with archLinux and Jean Tux5) and never looked back (except for the desktop with NVIDIA GPU that's pain in the 🍑 and only Ubuntu runs reasonably… well).

Wearing the red fedora also ruled out the Rocky Linux 🙂 as I don't endorse nor support their way of operation

So AlmaLinux it is!

Installing AlmaLinux 9​

I'm going with AlmaLinux 9.4 on Raspberry Pi 3B. Opened the AlmaLinux's wiki and first thing I got slapped by is

original Raspberry Pi 3 (without "+" models) are not supported

GREAT! I took the risk, installed it. And it didn't boot 😁 It turns out that the WiFi kernel module caused a kernel panic on the boot. From some people on Reddit I found that it caused some issues, but worked, so I've just decided to pop the SD card back in a PC and deny the module from loading. Voilà! It boots!

Setting up the “local server”​

Public disclaimer

I suck as admin…

Both the Raspberry and my VPS are maintained in the caveman-style 😄 And that's why I've decided to start with the less painful one (the Raspberry) to write the Ansible playbooks for :)

I have already managed to migrate my dotfiles and “bootstrap” to be run via Ansible, so I've just proceeded to extend that and also reorganize it a bit, cause the roles grew in size 👀

And I have to admit that I've been mostly successful. Let's delve into details!

SELinux​

Yeah… that's something that hasn't been running on the openSUSE and I totally forgot that hardening the SSHD config (including port change) requires notifying SELinux about the port change :) Of course I managed to cut myself off 😄

Certbot​

Certbot was the service I feared the most, as there is no reasonable way to automate this. You need to run it manually at least the first time. But in the end, it was quite OK.

Cockpit​

One downside of caveman-style administration is the fact that you forget about the tweaking you do. Reverse proxy breaks Cockpit by default. I was reading through the documentation, but haven't managed to find the part that mentioned the specific settings I had to change. When I was about to open the PR with proposed changes, I noticed that it was in a different chapter 🤦‍♂️

CUPS​

Cups went rather smoothly… except for the fact that it doesn't work on the one and only Ubuntu desktop and there are no logs with reason why it fails to add the printer 🙂

Additionally installing the HP printer via hp-setup is very interesting experience… I would've never expected the CLI to have a progress bar that opens up at 0% and then just switches into terms & conditions… Yes, that progress bar stayed at 0% even though it was downloading a PPD file and progressing.

DDNS​

I had smallish issue with deciding how to run the DDNS service. I went with dropping my own buggy script and had to choose a DDNS client. Found inadyn (that isn't built at all for Fedora and family) and ddclient. The ddclient had some not very nice feedback, and the version that introduced the Cloudflare support I need, was not included, so I dropped that. inadyn is not packaged, so I've set it up as systemd timer spawning a container :)

Summary​

Overall I've had a very pleasant experience setting up the AlmaLinux on the Raspberry. Even though I took a gamble with the officially unsupported model of RPi, it works. And it also seems to be filling the purpose it has!

Footnotes​

  1. AFAIK there was some issue with dependencies, so it is available on Tumbleweed and also in the latest Leap 15.6 ↩

  2. By default uses wicked and even when running it on desktop via NetworkManager I've hit some inconsistencies with DNS, but… DNS is the Devil, right? 😁 ↩

  3. And neither RHEL to be fair ;) ↩

  4. 6-month release cycle goes against the idea to have the least amount of updates as possible… and on top of that I think that we can safely agree on the fact that Fedora feels like archLinux with extra steps ↩

  5. Gentoo… ↩