Creating an SD card imgae: step-by-step

Creating an SD card image: step-by-step

Using a pre-built image

You can download a pre-built image from our releases page

These are experimental and unlikely to be fully working yet. These are built as multipart zip files with names like release.zip and release.z01, this is due to a 2GB upload limit in our build process. Download each of these. To extract them on a Linux system run the following:

cat release.z01 release.zip > carpentries-offline.zip

unzip carpentries-offline.zip

After you have downloaded and unzipped the image files, write the image file to an SD card with Etcher or your image writing program of choice.

Installing CarpentriesOffline manually

Setting up a Raspberry Pi

Download Raspbian OS Lite: https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/
Write image to SD card using rpi-imager: https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/

Setup for headless config (useful if you don’t have a screen and keyboard to hand)

In the boot (small FAT32) partition on the SD card create an empty file called “ssh”
If you’re using WiFi to get access to the Pi, create a file called wpa_supplicant.conf in the boot partition. Paste in the following and set your network SSID and password appropriately.

#set this to your country code, gb=great britain
country=gb
update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
 scan_ssid=1
 ssid="my_networks_ssid"
 psk="my_networks_password"
}

Use SSH or login with a local console if you have a monitor attached.

Run the install script

Login to your Raspberry Pi with an SSH client or on a local screen/keyboard and run the command:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/carpentriesoffline/carpentriesoffline-installer/main/setup.sh > setup.sh && bash ./setup.sh

Change the password

Run the passwd command. Leaving the default password will mean anybody in your workshop can login to your Pi and change settings on it.

Connect to Carpentries Offline

After installing the Raspberry Pi will reboot.
It will then switch the WiFi interface to access point mode and will be available as a network called carpentries-offline.
Connect to the carpentries-offline WiFi network
Visting http://carpentriesoffline.org or http://192.168.1.1
You should get links to the Carpentries Lessons and the Gitea server on the Raspberry Pi

Using PyPi and CRAN mirrors from your Pi

These are downloaded to the Pi and placed in http://192.168.1.1/pypi and http://192.168.1.1/miniCRAN.
You will need to update your settings to use these locations. (TODO: write instructions on how to do this)