Developer question: How to create/improve the existing dietpi-*** scripts & test them ?

[cmoulliard]

Is there a page detailing how we can develop new dietpi-**** scripts or improve them and test ?
Is there a debian container that we can use for that that purpose and script able to copy the the dietpi-***, files to the container ?
Can the dietpi-*** scripts run in a centos/fedora VM ?

[MichaIng]

You could use the DietPi container images: https://dietpi.com/downloads/images/
But those are no Docker images, i.e. there is no /init. We use them for building and testing via systemd-nspawn (systemd-container package).

When using a different Linux distro: Almost all scripts expect and load /boot/dietpi/func/dietpi-globals, which loads /boot/dietpi/.hw_model. The variables defined in that dotfile are needed by almost all scripts, so it makes sense to create this with some reasonable values, like:

G_HW_MODEL=20 # 20 => VM
G_HW_MODEL_NAME='Test VM (x86_64)' # Name here does not really matter, mostly visual
G_HW_ARCH=10 # 10 => x86_64
G_HW_ARCH_NAME=$(uname -m)
G_HW_CPUID=0 # 0 => undefined
G_HW_CPU_CORES=$(nproc)
G_DISTRO=8 # our historical internal numbering: 7 => Bookworm, 8 => Trixie, 9 => Forky
G_DISTRO_NAME='trixie'
G_ROOTFS_DEV=$(findmnt -no SOURCE /)
G_HW_UUID=$(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid) # could be also skipped, used only for dietpi-survey+bugreport uploads

Since apt-get is widely used, doing anything on bare CentOS/Fedora or another non-APT distro, will naturally have limits. And since some dietpi-software options install packages with per-Debian version package names, running it on a APT-based distro of too different age can cause APT errors, or in some cases invalid configs (if certain keys differ between Debian/package versions). It works somewhat well on Ubuntu, when using the next newer Debian version, e.g. Debian Trixie (8/trixie) on Ubuntu Noble, Debian Bookworm (7/bookworm) on Ubuntu Jammy. This is, since Ubuntu releases use the /etc/debian_version of the current Debian testing, which will be/is the next release, and due to Debian freeze schedule somewhat close regarding package states.

[MichaIng]

Which visualizer are you missing, that does not work with the QCOW2 (Proxmox/QEMU) or RAW image?

[cmoulliard]

On macos we can create a Linux VM using MacOS Virtualization framework: https://github.com/crc-org/vfkit. This is also what I'm doing to bump a VM on my macos: fedora, etc - https://github.com/ch007m/my-vfkit/

[MichaIng]

Interesting. I see it uses VirtIO devices, looks similar to KVM. Does this not work with the RAW VM image? Any special setup needed?

EDIT: I see you generate an EFI bootloader there (?), so it would require the (U)EFI image. And I see we do not list all of them on our download page. See here: https://dietpi.com/downloads/images/
DietPi_VM-x86_64-Trixie.img.xz without EFI, and DietPi_VM-UEFI-x86_64-Trixie.img.xz with EFI partition (GRUB bootloader), and respective ISO images.

[cmoulliard]

DietPi_VM-UEFI-x86_64-Trixie.img.xz For Macos we need ARM64 images and not anymore x86 - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple_silicon

[MichaIng]

Ah right, I forgot about that. So we need to finish this: #5637
VMware/ESXi lost relevancy, but the same grub-efi-arm64 based image should work on Apple Silicon as well.