Installing Nova Under Alpine on a Raspberry Pi

A simple Raspberry Pi can be a great way to experiment with Nova, and for some applications, it may even be a suitable device for production deployment. This article explains how to install Nova on an RPI using the lightweight Alpine distro.

Prerequisites

You will need the following:

• The latest Raspberry Pi aarch64 Alpine img file from the Alpine website.
• The latest Nova Installation Utility for the aarch64 platform.
• The selected Nova Raspberry Pi image from the Downloads page.
• A disk imaging tool such as Rufus or Win32DiskImager.
• A terminal program capable of SSH and ideally SCP, such as SmarTTY.
• An SD memory card of at least 8GB in size.
• Access to your RPI via HDMI and a USB keyboard.
• An Ethernet connection that can reach the Internet.

Installing Alpine

To install Alpine on the RPI:

• Using your disk imaging tool, write the Alpine img file to your SD card.
• Insert the SD card into your RPI and power it on.
• Your screen will show a logon prompt: Logon as root with no password.
• Run setup-alpine and answer the prompts.
• You can use defaults for most options, but you should ideally create a non-root user.
• When configuring the disk, the easiest option is to use the entire SD card in sys mode.
• When the Alpine setup has completed, reboot the RPI and allow Alpine to start.
• Note from the boot output the IP address allocated to the primary NIC.

Installing Nova

To install Nova on top of Alpine:

• For this example, we’ll assume your image file is for version R4-0048.
• Using your terminal program, SSH into the RPI at the noted IP using your non-root account.
• Using an SCP client, copy the NovaInstall and nif files into your home directory.
• If you are using SmarTTY, the SCP menu can be used to access the built-in SCP client.
• From your SSH session, run chmod +x NovaInstall
• Run doas apk add libc6-compat libstdc++
• Run doas ./NovaInstall --kiosk RaspberryPi-R4-0048.nif
• Omit the --kiosk switch to skip running the Chromium browser on the device.
• The installation program will install Nova together with the necessary packages.
• When the program has completed, run doas reboot to restart your device.
• Open a web browser on another device and navigate to the noted IP.
• Be patient, as first time execution may take a few minutes!

Next Steps

Refer to the articles on:

• First Time Log On;
• Avoiding Certificate Errors; and
• Licensing Your Installation.