pi-top USB Setup

About

Application that configures a pi-top using an USB drive, installing offline updates and setting up locales, language and wi-fi networks.

When a USB drive is plugged to the system with a file called pi-top-usb-setup.tar.gz, a udev rule starts a systemd service that extracts the tarball and runs the setup script.

The setup script updates the system using a local apt repository with the files in the USB drive, and the uses a JSON file to set the locales, language, keyboard layout and wi-fi network.

Each step of the setup process is optional and can be disabled by setting the corresponding key to false in the file located in /var/lib/pi-top-usb-setup/state.cfg.

File structure for pi-top-usb-setup.tar.gz

pi-top-usb-setup/
    pi-top_config.json
    certificates/
        # certificates to install
        ca-certificates/
            cert1.crt
            cert2.crt
            ...
    files/
        # files to copy to root of pi-top
        # e.g. to copy certificates create this nested folder structure
        usr/
            local/
                share/
                    ca-certificates/
                        cert1.crt
                        cert2.crt
                        ...
    scripts/
        # shell scripts to run
        01-update-certs.sh
        ...
    updates/
    updates_bookworm/

JSON

Sample JSON file to configure the device:

{
    "language": "en_GB",
    "country": "GB",
    "time_zone": "Europe/London",
    "keyboard_layout": ["gb", null],
    "email": "my@email.com",
    "network": {
        "ssid": "this-is-a-ssid",
        "authentication": {
            "type": "WPA_ENTERPRISE",
            "data": {
                "authentication": "PEAP",
                "anonymous_identity": "this-is-an-anonymous-identity",
                "username": "this-is-a-username",
                "inner_authentication": "MSCHAPv2",
                "password": "this-is-a-password",
            },
        },
    },
}

State configuration file

The application configuration file is located in /var/lib/pi-top-usb-setup/state.cfg and contains the state of the setup process.

A sample of the file with the default values is the following:

[app]
install_update = true
install_certificates = true
copy_files = true
run_scripts = true
install_network = true
complete_onboarding = true
configure_device = true