What are the installed defaults and configuration settings?

Our aim is produced an image as close as possible to a plain, basic Debian install. That is, we don’t provide an image preloaded with a desktop environment, programming tools, enabled services, nor any other niceties. You get a simple Debian system, as close as possible as we believe you can get to what d-i would yield.

Of course, due to the media being different, there are some differences. We will try to list them all here; for further details on the specific adequation steps, you might be interested in looking at our master vmdb2 image builder spec.

Default settings

Configurable pre-kernel-load settings

The Raspberry firmware is set to read and apply settings from the config.txt and cmdline.txt files in the firmware partition. This will be the first partition in your image (please refer to how to find your SD card’s device if you are doing this from your regular computer), and it is mounted under /boot/firmware when booting from the Raspberry.

We do not aim to document all said settings, please refer to the Raspberry Pi documentation:

Configurable system settings

The image is configured to process the /boot/firmware/sysconf.txt file at boot time; this functionality can be disabled by issuing:

systemctl disable rpi-set-sysconf

The currently defined settings are:

In the future, a way to configure wireless networking should be added to this section.