SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Developer Gavin L Rebeiro has posted[*see note below] a five-part article series at Techrights on how to deal with the ongoing Raspberry Pi fiasco by salvaging existing hardware with a replacement operating system.
- Part I: Acknowledgements
- Part II: Introduction
- Part III: Fundamentals
- Part IV: Doing The Task
- Part V: All The Rest
He covers the background, the technical principles, some methods for mitigation, proposes using NetBSD in place of the GNU/Linux, Raspberry Pi OS. Finally, he walks through installation of NetBSD.
We don't want to be spied on; what happens when we're faced with an operating system that spies on people? We throw it in the trash where it belongs! I am boycotting the Raspberry Spy myself (you're free to join me in doing so) but I don't want people to waste hardware that they already have. So we're going to walk through an interesting path of installing a different operating system on the Raspberry Spy; I want to show you a few things that will empower you to take greater control over your computing.
We'll gently walk through and explore the following: how to install an operating system on an embedded device (a Raspberry Spy, in this case) over a USB-to-UART bridge (UTUB). This is the main project we've got on our hands. Don't worry if you've never touched embedded systems before; everything here is accessible to people with a modest set of prerequisite knowledge and some basic apparatus.
We'll delve into things with more depth as we move forward with our project; if you don't understand something when you first encounter it, just keep reading.
NetBSD might be a bit of a leap for some, so it should be noted that there are other GNU/Linux distros for the Raspberry Pi which do not include the problems addressed above.
The focus of the series is on individual privacy, but a parallel threat exists for institutions because, after the recent changes, any use of Raspberrry Pi OS will show up at their most hostile competitor, Microsoft. The company has had a do-not-lose-to-Linux-at-any-cost attitude for decades and has various slush funds available to fund attacks. EDGI was one such program which did a lot of damage around the world and has been described in fair detail in the Comes v Microsoft case.
[* Ed's Note (2021-03-12): The author has let us know that his original article is available as a PDF, as techrights' version wasn't faithful. -- FP]
Previously:
(2021) Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:51AM (4 children)
Is it possible to prohibit dpkg from installing any executables that use root permission?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday March 09 2021, @03:16AM (3 children)
Otherwise, not so much.
This is why I instinctively shied away from the thing the moment I first heard of it. The whole premise is you delegate all responsibility over program installation and uninstallation to this /super-cool/ program and from now on instead of remembering how to do it you just ask the program nicely and it does it all for you!
Not a fan of the concept. Not at all.
*I* am root. I do not delegate root.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @03:53AM (2 children)
"Otherwise, not so much."
I forget what kind of concatenation deb files use, but yeah, the extractor is one of the normal system tools. So you can extract debs without apt-get or dpkg just fine.I've done this a few times over the years to put libreoffice on non-standard distros. It's been a while so I don't remember which tools.
So yes there is. Extract the package, edit it, tar it, move it, untar it. Really most of that can be done with a few lines of shell script. Which is really what a lot of package managers are. I know VOID's whole package management system is written in bash. Which I would consider a feature if the author had bothered to comment his code.
Generally most package managers are about serving distro managers, rather than admins. Which is why they mostly all suck, from a users perspective.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday March 09 2021, @04:15AM
The primary problem is this encourages the users pretty little head to remain empty, and when he needs help he finds he's unable to even describe the problem in general terms; eventually he is all too likely to expire from asphyxiation, after the vocal track has been completely submerged in saliva for far too many minutes.
And the secondary problem is even when the user knows exactly what's happened, and how to fix it, fixing it breaks the package management system. Which either defends itself like a virus, or is Slackware.
Lord; bless and keep Patrick V.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @09:41PM
VOID scripting is in bash, but the package manager is in C. That's why it's one of the faster ones out there.