[Devel] Status of rpi-imager images of Apertis

[Andrej Shadura]

Hello Tim,

First of all, thanks for your message, it’s great to see interest in 
Apertis on Raspberry Pi.

On 16/08/2022 22:51, Bird, Tim wrote:
> Hello Apertis developers,
> 
> I would like to experiment with Apertis on a raspberry PI board, and I was interested to
> see that there are Apertis entries that show up in the rpi-imager tool, to create an sdcard
> for OS installation on a raspberry pi.
> 
> However, when I choose one of the Apertis images with rpi-imager, I get an error:
> "Error downloading: The requested URL returned error: 404 - Server IP: 46.235.227.188"
> I got the same error for other images (I tried Apertis Headless image and Apertis Graphics image).
> 
> The Image URL reported by rpi-imager is:
> https://images.apertis.org/release/v2022/v2022.1/arm64/hmi/apertis_v2022-hmi-arm64-rpi64_v2022.1.img
> 
> Note that I can ping images.apertis.org.
> 
> Looking at the images site manually, I see that there is a file:
> https://images.apertis.org/release/v2022/v2022.1/arm64/hmi/apertis_v2022-hmi-arm64-rpi64_v2022.1.img.gz
> (that is, the image filename but with the .gz extension), but indeed there is no file ending in just .img.

I have verified the file 
https://images.apertis.org/rpi/apertis-oslist-stable.json that the 
rpi-image tool uses, and indeed, it links to the non-compressed image, 
whereas we only publish compressed images.

I believe this should mean the scripts we use to generate this file may 
be buggy. I’ll file an issue to have this looked at.

> Are Apertis images still being created and supported for the rpi-imager tool?
> Is this just a bad URL path issue?
> Should the rpi-image database refer to the img.gz file, or should the .img file be on the images.apertis.org site?
> Are the raspberry pi images meant to be up-to-date?
> 
> My purpose to use these images is to test some automated testing tools (Fuego) with Apertis.

 From what I can see, the daily builds should be downloadable with 
rpi-imager, as the image list file for them has the correct URLs.

Meanwhile, I can recommend you use bmaptool to write the image directly 
to the SD card like this:

     bmaptool copy 
https://images.apertis.org/release/v2022/v2022.1/arm64/hmi/apertis_v2022-hmi-arm64-rpi64_v2022.1.img.gz 
/dev/mmcblk0

While a command-line tool, bmaptool is very robust, can automatically 
download and verify images, decompress them on the fly, and skip 
unallocated parts of the image, speeding up the process.

-- 
Cheers,
   Andrej