Use a pibox base image
pibox currently uses the vanilla raspbian lite image which is a 1.4GB image grabbed off a 300MB ZIP download.
It consists of :
- 66MB FAT32 boot partition
- 1.3GB ext4 root partition (723MB used)
Creating a custom, pibox image based on this image would allow us to:
- Add a separate partition for contents (ZIM, etc). This partition could be in a different file system to accommodate mounting on both Linux, macOS and Windows (exfat?).
- Add mandatory tools and configuration:
- enable SSH to remove the parsing/detecting of the login
- install source lists and very-basic packages.
- install packages that we'll most likely need in any version of ansiblecube to save on their install stage (python, nginx, git, etc)
To reduce the workload of maintaining this image, modifications should:
- be as limited as possible
- be very-well documented in a script-like fashion
I don't think automating it is worth the hassle as the raspbian image changes overtime and might require tweaks.
For the record, in the last 2 years, there has been 7/8 versions per year yet we are not upgrading (no need) so maintaining this base image should be considered a once-per-year activity IMO.