Freedomstack

Overview

On Thursday, April 21 2022 a meeting was held at meet.gr0x0rd.com where we discussed the necessity of building a local alternative to the internet. We agreed that we would use raspberry pi devices running linux that could serve as hosts for a mesh network based on reticulum and qortal. I was tasked with getting an image up and running that could be deployed to pi devices within the community, and to provide that image.

My intention here is to provide the instructions for building said image so that can be reviewed by the community and leveraged by others.

After some basic research I have, at least initially, chosen to implement this project using Archlinux.

Why Archlinux?

There will probably be some questions on why I would choose Archlinux to run on the Raspberry Pi ARM architecture as opposed to the default Raspberry Pi OS or some other more common or vanilla distro. Some justification for that thought process:

• Customization. Arch is highly customizable and lean, but doesn't suffer from the "build your own excitement brick by brick" heavy lifting of Gentoo and other from-source distros.
• Heterogeneity. The most commonly used distros, and those will some sort of corporate structure attached (for example Red Hat and Ubuntu) will be early targets.
• It's Canadian. Yes, Arch is still a Canadian based project, as far as I know eh.
• Documentation. The community docs are great (I haven't ever had to ask a question on the forums and have run it nearly 5 years) and have expanded on that here in this wiki.

Install

If you are unfamiliar with the raspberry pi and how it works, you may benefit from browsing some of my previous documentation.