Hibbian Installer First Release
Howdy,
I'm genuinely thrilled to announce that after years of me working away, one small project at a time, it is now possible to head over to download.hibbian.org and download either a PC or a Raspberry Pi image!
PC Live & Installer Image - Stable
This is an iso compatible with any amd64 computer - this comprises most machines sold in the last 15 years.
That said, I'd recommend at least 4GB RAM, preferably 8GB, and a not too old CPU. If there's enough demand for a lightweight environment for old machines, I can add this to make life nicer.
The image needs to be written to a USB stick - on Windows I'd recommend Rufus. When the PC boots you will meet a live environment running Debian Stable & KDE Plasma 5 which contains the majority of the Debian Hamradio packages. You may check the list in the latest release notes.
These are the latest versions of the packages available in Debian - either backported by my colleagues in the Debian Hams team or quietly ported to the Hibbian Repo by me to ensure compatibility.
The image contains an installer so you can easily install to your local system if you prefer the conventional approach of running from a hard drive or you can ignore it and use the live image directly as your system disk!
Live Image Features
The live image will run entirely from the USB stick it is on, can be made to boot to RAM if you have enough and offers the 'persistence' feature, where a partition on the USB stick, a local drive or another drive is used to store data between reboots. Persistence is documented here and I'll write more on it soon.
This is particularly helpful for contest stations, special event stations or club shacks - somewhere you may choose to use a personal machine but don't want to touch your data.
Alternatively, you may want to use new images to update your system by flashing to USB instead of managing internet-based incremental software updates. It offers an immutable, known setup you can always come back to, with persistence holding your configs and logs between systems.
Raspberry Pi Image - Beta
This is a respin of the Raspberry Pi OS, using the same concept - stable core, up to date packages. It uses the same backports and the same Hibbian repo to offer the latest and greatest in the world of Ham Radio Software.
This is a conventional Raspberry Pi Image for all 64 bit Pi (3 onwards). It can be flashed using the Custom option in Raspberry Pi Imager, and on first boot will walk you through setting up a user, WiFi and so on.
I have tested this on a Pi400 and it boots, opens applications and the like. It's not there yet - there are some quirks of the tools I'm still learning, and some technical updates I'd like to make to my package list and pre-configuration before it's settled.
This is a big image unzipped - you will need a 16GB or bigger SD Card, USB Stick or NVME.
Feedback, comments and broken bits are welcome on both by emails to hibby at debian.org, or on the fediverse at @red@woof.tech, or via other channels you know to get my attention. Once things stabilise, both of these images will be automatically generated weekly on a Sunday - until I have stabilised things, they will generate daily!
I have a big technical update in the works on the build setup, both hardware and my terrifying mess of bash scripts as some people will find that interesting too!