- 1.0 Introduction
- 2.0 Pictures
- 3.0 Requirements
- 4.0 Assembly
PiKVM is not a software you will install on Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian). It is rather a lightweight OS, based on Arch Linux ARM.
For the Raspberry Pi 4 and Zero (2) W pre-compiled images are available. However, we will build the operating system ourselves. For that, you will need a x86-64 machine (or a virtual server).
In this example Debian 11 Bullseye was used.
📢 Official: Building PiKVM OS - PiKVM Handbook
apt install git make curl binutils
apt install docker.io
usermod -aG docker $USER
mkdir /root/pikvm
cd /root/pikvm
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/pikvm/os
cd os
Now you need to create a the configuration file config.mk
at /root/pikvm/os/config.mk
.
Do not use the default values for passwords. Instead, generate a random 16-character password using following command:
printf '%s\n' $(head /dev/urandom | LC_ALL=C tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c16)
# rpi4 for Raspberry Pi 4; rpi3 for Raspberry Pi 3; rpi2 for the version 2, zero2w for Zero2W
BOARD = rpi4
# Hardware configuration
PLATFORM = v2-hdmi
# Target hostname
HOSTNAME = kvm-srv1
# ru_RU, etc. UTF-8 only
LOCALE = en_US
# See /usr/share/zoneinfo
TIMEZONE = Europe/Berlin
# For SSH root user
ROOT_PASSWD = ...
# Web UI credentials: user=admin, password=<this>
WEBUI_ADMIN_PASSWD = ...
# IPMI credentials: user=admin, password=<this>
IPMI_ADMIN_PASSWD = ...
# SD card device
# (Irrelevant in our case, as we will burn the image later using the Raspberry Pi Imager)
CARD = /dev/mmcblk0
After your configuration is ready, you can build the OS. That will take about half an hour:
make os
After that, we will make the image. It will be stored as xz
compressed file in /root/pikvm/os/images
make SUDO= image
If not compressed, you can manually compress it as .tar.gz
:
cd /root/pikvm/os/images
tar --dereference -czvf v2-hdmi-rpi4-latest.img.tar.gz v2-hdmi-rpi4-latest.img
You can download the offical Raspberry Pi Imager here. Flashing is easy, refer to the official documentation for that step:
📢 Official: Flashing the OS image - PiKVM Handbook