Hello I am hoping some people might be able to give me some direction on how I may go about the following:
I run a series of printers that I am in the process of converting over to be run off Octoprint. Each of the Printers will have a 7" touchscreen and a Raspberry Pi(3) attached.
I have a setup a Raspberry Pi(3) with a touchscreen and have it working well. However in order to do this I had to make several changes to the config file as well as run the command to install the desktop for Octoprint and some other software related changes.
Instead of having to do this on each Pi is it possible to copy the SD card I already have finished? Or how would people go about creating a master SD / install to use?
Linux includes support for ext4 file systems so you can then directly mount the microSD in the step where you're trying to edit after the clone.
Within Linux you can install—if it's not there already—the gparted GUI editor. There might be a way of simply cloning from one microSD to a second if you have the right adapters for your computer.
I wrote for a client a cool Ubuntu-based server which did all this automatically to burn customized clones of microSD card images.
In your case, though, you're probably interested in cloning six more microSD cards and then using your Ubuntu to edit-in-place the configuration files as required. Make sure to re-issue unique UUIDs or to remove them from the other six's /home/pi/.octoprint/config.yaml files. As well, /etc/hostname should be re-issued and /etc/hosts needs the correct name. The nice thing about the Linux part is that you don't have to iteratively 1) power off all other printers, 2) bring up the one you're updating, 3) edit it for its uniqueness, 4) repeat.
Rather than a VM, you might consider just using a Live Boot Ubuntu USB thumb drive. It will literally bootup in under two minutes and you're in business.