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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 08 2021, @10:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the same-old-M$ dept.

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.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday March 09 2021, @09:44AM (3 children)

    by Rich (945) on Tuesday March 09 2021, @09:44AM (#1121726) Journal

    how hard is it to disable the M$ PPA

    It's relatively easy. Instructions on the net involve a bit of text editing in /etc/apt/...

    However, it was sneaked into there by non-standard means, so - trustworthy as they are now - a security-aware user needs to assume that they restore it without consent "by accident" or for some other lame made-up reason.

    Switching to "proper" Debian (does Devuan for systemd-haters work on Raspis?) is a reasonable thing to do, if one doesn't want too much change. It doesn't have to be NetBSD as in the article. (But thank heavens, NetBSD stays around and offers a last-resort choice).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @04:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @04:46PM (#1121879)

    I believe Devuan does have a Raspi distribution based on Debian. I would like to switch my deployed machines to it, but a single Raspbian image has run on all deployed versions (1, 2, 3) of the hardware, while I think Debian has separate distros for the CPUs in them.

    Can anyone fill in my blanks? I would have tried myself, but it is still hard going into work and having a test bench.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 10 2021, @03:16AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday March 10 2021, @03:16AM (#1122120)

    Switching to "proper" Debian seems like a lot more hassle than writing a script launched by a daily cron job to just clean M$ out of the PPAs - surprised this hasn't surfaced yet, certainly less disruptive to the community and just as pointed a protest.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 10 2021, @01:02PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 10 2021, @01:02PM (#1122238)

    (does Devuan for systemd-haters work on Raspis?)

    Thats a solid "kinda of"

    I would say its a lot less work, and its a lot more officially documented, to get FreeBSD working on a pi.

    I need to point out I've never used a FreeBSD Pi outside of headless mode and from memory the default logins were freebsd/freebsd and root/root

    From memory there was nothing weird about GPIO access or USB support in FreeBSD but wifi was not fun. My app used PoE to power the Pi so I truly didn't care about wifi drama, although I could imagine wifi only people could get a bit freaked out. I suppose you need wired ethernet to download the stuff you'll need to get wifi working assuming you want/need wifi and can set it up.

    Note that there isn't "the pi" there's like three generations now and you get the fun of matching install image to board generation. Not rocket surgery but something to look out for.

    These kind of things tend to only improve over time plus or minus firmware licensing drama.