Gene, A little bit more information in each post would help a whole lot here.
For others following along at home this saga is unclear: for others, here's my attempted summary: The ARM machines ================ Gene has a network of small ARM SBCs. They're not Raspberry Pi's, they're one of the somewhat similar range of OrangePis. Over a period of years, he's had Intel machines, Raspberry Pi machines, Orange Pis either running heavy machinery like lathes (see threads on linuxcnc) or now 3D printers. The Armbian OS ============== These run Armbian, not vanilla Debian. Armbian is similar, but the impetus behind the project is to get unsupported boards supported using a vendor's BSP (board support package) enough to then add Debian packages Armbian as a project is extremely useful but extremely limited: they barely have enough time to compe with the huge numbers of boards now in circulation and insufficient developers. They don't have enough for user support on a regular basis. Using small ARM SBCs - 3D printing ================================== >From what I can see, Gene has several of the OrangePi boards, each running a 3D printer. Package selection ================= Gene has some some definite preferences in package selection: synaptic as a graphical tool for package selection rather than apt-get, apt or aptitude and he will sometimes blame the tools for somehow messing up the packages he wants to install. Risk appetite ============= Unlike some others on the list, he's happy to be an experimentalist and to run third party tools and all in one packages like Appimages and Flatpaks if they serve his purpose. He's also prepared to build things from random sources. In this, he's prepared to be on the very definite bleeding edge and sometimes suffers for it :) kiauh https://github.com/th33xitus/kiauh ===== This is from a Github repository. It is a script, [Klipper Installation And Update Helper] to pull together an SD card image and various applications to produce an integrated environment for 3D printing. Requirements: Raspbian Lite or equivalent small environment. It can be run on Ubuntu Jammy - the site itself notes that it has some installations run on Armbian but the status of support is unknown. Essentially, it pulls in a base list of Debian packages then lots of third party repositories to provide the functionality. Takeaways ========= >From this: Gene, I think you need to start from something really minimal: I'd suggest you have a look at which packages are in Rasbian Lite and attempt to emulate that. Debian with no graphics environment and standard packages might be enough to bootstrap it - so no initial need for X or Firefox or Chromium. That means working on the command line - but that's what tasksel and apt are designed for. An approach? ============ Write stuff down so you can explain it. Buid a list of steps. The first step is probably to set up a minimal system and get it networked. You've already had discussions on how to do this: if all else fails, I suggest you look at Gunnar Wolf's advice on Debian Raspberry Pi images and how he set up /etc/network/interfaces from the outset. Don't just run kiauh without understanding what the scripts are doing, at least in outline. Don't attempt to second guess the script maintainer and try and build your own that's better until you *REALLY* know how it's meant to work using the unmodified script. If needs be, dig up a Raspberry Pi to do it once the way it's been done previously. *Do* report back to the kiauh script maintainer what you've needed to do to get it to work on Armbian. Once you've got one SD card, you can potentially just duplicate it for all of the machines and do a minimal edit set thereafter. It doesn't look as if you need a web browser on each machine: if you set up nginx on each to talk to a different network port, you can probably cycle around them all and control from one machine. Oh - and use meaningful subject lines. If need be "kiauh - step one - networking" so that those of us who are interested might help rather than being left in the dark. All best, as ever, Andy Cater
