Getting Started
I recently added a new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ to my home lab and need to use it with both Raspbian and CentOS for a customer’s testing. The Raspbian instructions are nearly identical to the Raspberry Pi Zero despite being a 64-bit ARM8 system. Getting it working with CentOS was relatively straightforward since it’s a popular platform, but I figured I should document it for ease of reproducibility.
I primarily followed the instructions from the CentOS Linux on the Raspberry Pi 3 wiki and RichTech Security & Technology Guide: CentOS 7 Installation Guide on Raspberry PI.
Installing the Base Image
CentOS has official Raspberry Pi 3 builds, I downloaded mine from the mirror listing and downloaded the CentOS-Userland-7-armv7hl-RaspberryPI-Minimal-1810-sda.raw.xz to keep it minimal.
I flashed the image onto a 32 gig microSD card with baleenaEtcher for OSX.
With my microSD card ready I plugged in my HDMI cable, a USB keyboard, and an ethernet cable and booted into CentOS.
Configuring CentOS
The default user/password combination on CentOS is root and centos, which you’ll want to immediately change with passwd. The first thing I did was resize the filesystem to expand into the entire microSD card with
/usr/bin/rootfs-expand
Next I configured the hostname with
hostnamectl set-hostname banjo.bottlebru.sh
where banjo is the shortname and bottlebru.sh is the internal-only domain I use for my systems. Next I set the timezone to Australia/Sydney with
timedatectl set-timezone Australia/Sydney
Package Updates
To get the latest versions of the base install I ran
yum update
and rebooted the system to ensure the hostname and timezone changes were in effect.
WiFi
Initially I used the ethernet port, but I wanted to use the wifi. Configuring wifi is several steps, but this post provides a link to a script that configures your Raspberry Pi 3 wifi. Be sure to read it since you’re running it as root :)
curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/9119317cdf0c141cb50c523db0f3b70f/raw/d4c2bedcf4799783ca0bf5f54a52e82241faea93/wifi-setup-c7-rpi3.sh >> wifi-setup.sh
chmod +x wifi-setup.sh
./wifi-setup.sh SSID PASSWORD
Then I rebooted the box and unplugged the ethernet, video, and keyboard. It was now on my network via wifi and ready to be remotely administered.