Mintify

Mintify 21.3 (Virginia)

Warning

Use the following how-to and Mintify script AT YOUR OWN RISK!
They come with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY of any kind!

License

GPL v3.0+

Prerequisites

1. Supported hardware (listed below) or enough courage to try the script on unsupported hardware. At least 2GB of RAM is recommended to avoid swapping.

2. Fast and durable internal or external storage (NVMe/SSD) with ext4 (or any Linux filesystem supported by the running kernel) and 50GB of free space (15GB for the installation + 35GB for the build environment). Storage systems without wear leveling support (eg. SD cards, USB flash drives, ancient SSDs) are unsuitable as their lifespan could decrease significantly or they could die!

3. Internet conection with unlimited quota for transferred data, as gigabytes of packages need to be downloaded.

4. Enough time that you can set aside for the script to run. The time requirements are written below.

5. Sufficient knowledge of Linux to overcome any shortcomings of this how-to.

How-to

1. Download one of the following recommended images and boot it. For booting from USB, read the 'Good to know' section.

DC-ROMA Laptop (riscv64) - Armbian 23.8.1 Jammy [unofficial v0.1] (sha256) {>11hrs}
Odroid XU4 (armv7l) - Armbian 23.11.1 Jammy (sha256) {>9hrs}
Pandaboard (armv7l) - Armbian 23.11.1 Jammy [unofficial v0.1] (sha256) {>23hrs}
Pine A64+ (aarch64) - Armbian 23.11.1 Jammy (sha256) {>19hrs}
Pinebook Pro (aarch64) - Armbian 23.11.1 Jammy (sha256) {>8hrs}
Raspberry Pi 4B (aarch64) - Armbian 23.11.1 Jammy (sha256) {>8hrs}
Raspberry Pi 5B (aarch64) - Armbian 24.2.5 Jammy (sha256) {>4hrs}
VisionFive 2 (riscv64) - Armbian 23.8.1 Jammy [unofficial v0.1] (sha256) {>11hrs}

2. Create a regular user called mintify (or any name that differs from your usual one)

3. Connect to a network with Internet access

4. Become root (if you are not yet)

sudo su

5. Create the required directories

mkdir -p /mintify/chroot

6. If (despite the recommendations) you are booting from slow media, then at least mount the previously mentioned faster and durable (and preferably empty) storage under the /mintify/chroot mount point (and optionally make the mount permanent via /etc/fstab)

mount /dev/XXXXX /mintify/chroot

7. Go to the /mintify dir and download the mintify script (note there are three V letters in the address)

cd /mintify && wget http://mintify.tavvva.net/mintify-21.3.sh

8. Make the script executable

chmod +x mintify-21.3.sh

9. Run the script in interactive or non-interactive mode (use -h for help)

/mintify/mintify-21.3.sh

Good to know

1. To boot from a USB drive, you can either try 'Tow-Boot' or clone the SD card contents to the USB drive (with dd or by writing the same image again) and then change the UUID/LABEL of the root file system on the SD card to prevent the kernel from using it, as changing the UUID/LABEL of the root file system on the USB drive requires editing the 'root' or 'rootdev' variable in the bootloader configuration on the SD card and each image can differ in a way of achieving that (boot.ini, cmdline.txt, uEnv.txt or boot.scr). In some cases (eg. boot.scr) the modification is not even directly possible and u-boot-tools/mkimage are required. The UUID/LABEL can be modified with gparted.

2. The contents of the /mintify/chroot/repo directory are reusable. If you want to deploy the port to multiple computers, then transfer the repo content and run the script from #8 in the menu (interactive mode) or with the -i option (non-interactive mode; use -h for help). If you transfer the whole chroot, then rename or delete the /mintify/chroot/status directory to allow the non-interactive mode to pass and to see the correct status in the interactive mode.

3. Some repositories (eg. Armbian) are time sensitive and apt fails to update the database when the HW is missing RTC (real-time clock) and the clock is not synchronized. In such cases you need to set the correct date and time prior running the Mintify script. You can install ntpdate and fix the time with ntpdate tik.cesnet.cz or similar.

4. Codecs are not installed automatically and you can install them with the following command (once you complete the installation procedure):

apt install mint-meta-codecs

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