Armbian noob cannot download etcher or USBimager, is dd OK?

[offgridNerd]

Hey all...

 

Looking to put something a LOT more lightweight than RaspiOS (and not-modern-desktoppy at all, please) on my Pi4Bs.  Found out about armbian from the Wikipedia page and downloaded the Jammy CLI image, but I can't get either gitlab or github to talk to me for downloading either of the recommended imagers; gitlab just gives me a blank page (no HTMl at all, per Firefox "view source") and github outright refuses connections.  If it's important I do not have accounts on either system, and am loath to create same, although I could if necessary.

 

I don't have Internet at home so I'm doing this from a Win10 PC at my public library; it's running the current Firefox (122.0).  (My Pis will also live offline; I don't currently have a portable screen/mouse/KB to haul down here to do online installs, so I know I'll be stuck with only whatever's already in your images, for now anyway.)

 

Can I just dd the image to a new/blank uSD card (Sandisk class 10, A1)?  I'm fully capable of verifying the result, been admining UNIX systems since the 80s and Linux since 0.99pl6 or so...

 

(I'll surely have more questions about making any resulting system work without internet connectivity, but first things first.)

[SteeMan]

Yes dd will work

[going]

12 часов назад, offgridNerd сказал:

I'll surely have more questions about making any resulting system work without internet connectivity

After your image is recorded on the SD card with the dd command, during the first startup,

the root partition will be stretched over all free space and you will need to configure the user,

language preferences, system clock....
This process proceeds without an emergency if the device is connected to the Internet and

requires access to the Linux console, for example "minicom" via UART.

 

If the device does not have a real-time hardware clock, this will cause problems with subsequent system starts.
The system service will send a request to the time server at startup and wait indefinitely for a response.
This is what you need to pay attention to first.

[ag123]

note that various armbian os images are linked on github

https://github.com/armbian/os

https://github.com/armbian/os/releases

are you able to download images from there?

you probably have to copy that say into a usb thumb/flash drive

bring that home and you can try flashing that using dd from your raspberry pi

I think there are also torrents link as alternative on the boards web pages, but I'm not too sure if you are able to download torrents say on a public terminal.

[offgridNerd]

ag123: I was able to get github.com/armbian/os/releases to load, ONCE... then never again.  (Apparently github hates these shared PCs or something.)  Torrents are probably a no-go... I don't think these shared library machines have a client, and they won't run any code I sneakernet in.

 

going: I have a hardware RTC for the Pi (DS3231-based).  I'll dd the Jammy CLI download I snagged earlier to a clean uSD and boot a Pi4B up to see what happens.  IIRC it's easy to reconfigure the time service to function without NTP.

 

Thanks to everybody for the feedback.